Prime Time - Jane Fonda [11]
Me rounding up bison on one of Ted Turner’s ranches in southern New Mexico.
© ANNIE LEIBOVITZ/CONTACT PRESS IMAGES
As we drove across the top of a high mesa, the vast, lunar landscape extended as far as I could see—endless, flat mesas, volcanic rimrock, steep canyons where exposed geologic strata gave evidence of upheavals and ancient oceans, created perhaps during Paleolithic times. Surrounded on all sides by stark reminders of the earth’s fourteen-billion-year existence, I felt the issue of time—the inexorability of it—pressing in on me. Okay, I know that in the grand scheme of things, three decades are negligible, but this was my life. Those three decades to come were my decades. What had I done with all the time—the almost six decades—now past? What did I want to do with my remaining time? How could I make the most of these coming years?
In the theater, the Third Act is when everything that has happened in Acts I and II must pay off if the play is to be memorable. “Maybe life is like that,” I thought. Maybe, in order to know how to have a good Third Act, I needed to look back at Acts I and II—to do what is called a life review. Maybe in order to answer my own questions, I would have to figure out what my first two acts had been about.
I knew I had to clear a path to my future by clarifying the road from my past until now. As I said in my memoirs, My Life So Far, I didn’t want to be like Christopher Columbus, who didn’t know where he was headed when he left, didn’t know where he was when he got there, and didn’t know where he’d been when he got back.
As we drove past walls of exposed rock, I saw how the stratifications revealed events, layered one on top of another over long periods of time. Just like life. Experiences are laid down, and for a while, the most recent one is the top, the plateau, the ground on which you walk. But then newer experiences occur and new layers are put down, changing the size and color and slope of what came before.
By the time the cowboys and I had arrived back at ranch headquarters, I had made up my mind that I would spend my fifty-ninth year excavating my life—examining the strata of my years.
I had also decided to make a short video based on my research that I might show, if it was good enough, to guests at my sixtieth-birthday party a year hence. This would give me a concrete narrative project with a deadline that I would have to meet. Maybe from the vantage point of fifty-nine, after surveying, observing, and reflecting upon the events and people of my past, I might gain a new understanding of them. And a new understanding might lead me, loins girded, into a successful last act.
I had a lot of experiences to learn from. We all do. There is a very human tendency to deny the failures and tragedies in our lives, but these are the very things that sometimes deliver us to ourselves—if we can learn from them.
I have known failures of all kinds: career failures, wrong paths taken, time wasted, relationships spoiled—the bumps along the searches and meanders of my life. Those failures that I ran from taught me nothing. Those that I confronted, cozied up to, and understood were the ones that permitted me quantum leaps forward. In another way of looking at it, they became the compost from which new growth emerged.
There are usually no rewards without a price. You can’t learn much that is new by playing it safe. Someone once said to me, “God doesn’t look for awards and medals, God looks for wounds. God enters us through our wounds.” I decided I would look at my wounds, see what they could teach me, let them help me set my compass and rechart a course for the time that remained. What I had to continually bear in mind