Prime Time - Jane Fonda [131]
Western societies do not psychologically equip us to confront death. It’s viewed as an indignity that needs to be “cleaned up.” But if you really think about it, life exists only in relation to death, just as light exists only in relation to dark and sound exists only in relation to silence. Death gives shape and meaning to our lives. Very old people know this. None of the centenarians I have interviewed were afraid of dying. On the contrary, their very proximity to it seems to give their lives exquisite meaning.
Rachel Lehman, who was 104 years old when I talked with her, told me she thinks of death quite often. “I am willing to accept it and I just don’t care what happens,” she said. Ben Burke, age 101, told me, “Well, we can’t help thinking about death on occasion. But it seems I am so busy, so involved with my different activities that it is kind of on the back burner. But on the other hand I say, Well, when it happens if I can only be plunking my banjo and pass off into the sunset, that would be the best of all—while doing what I enjoy doing.”
Not all societies are as death-denying as ours. All indigenous, preindustrial, precapitalist cultures not only venerate the aged, they consciously cultivate a life-affirming death awareness. In Vietnam, the bones of the deceased are buried in the fields so that they will fertilize the rice that feeds the deceased’s families and, thus, it is believed, there is physical and spiritual continuity, and the children inherit the strength of their ancestors.
In Mexico you can see death all around you as part of everyday life: Souvenir shops display miniature skeletons dancing and playing instruments, and chocolate candies shaped like skeletons. On All Saints’ Day, November 1, families load up on wine, bread, and cheese and camp out on their loved ones’ graves, singing, reminiscing, and celebrating. All these customs demonstrate that part of life is rehearsing for old age and death, welcoming it with open arms, humor, and respect.
We can choose to sink into age, denying, resisting, and protesting, and thus miss the fruits of wholeness. Or we can be liberated to live a full and vibrant life by choosing to grow into age, accepting, letting go, embracing the emptiness to come with humility.
Death is a democratic inevitability for every one of us. In my opinion, there’s something worse than death, and that is never having fully lived.
CHAPTER 21
The Work In
I practiced meditation to give my life a spine on which to hang my heart, and a view from which I could see beyond what I thought I knew.
—ZEN PRIEST JOAN HALIFAX
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
—MARCEL PROUST
THE JANE FONDA WORKOUT BECAME A VIDEO PHENOMENON IN the 1970s, launching the video industry as well as the acceptability of women’s muscles. But these days, while I continue to maintain my strength, flexibility, and aerobic fitness as best I can, I find myself turning more and more to the work in. This chapter is about how I got there. But there are many paths to the realms that lie within.
On several occasions when I was young and lost, I took off to somewhere entirely foreign in the hope that I would “find myself.” The instinct was well-founded. As we learn from mythology, the passage to a new and important phase in life always required the hero (heroes were the only ones written about back then, although plenty of sheroes had preceded them) to pass into the unknown, cut off from all that was safe and familiar. Joseph Campbell called it the “hero’s journey.”
The problem was, I didn’t understand that the answers I was looking for could come only if I gave myself up to the foreignness, allowing myself to be a blank slate. Instead, although the environs were new, I remained the same old me, desperately seeking the safety of activity and companionship