Prime Time - Jane Fonda [17]
Doing a life review can allow us to discover a different reality lurking within those already-lived years. What exquisite freedom this could give us if it allowed us to rearrange our attitudes about our experiences and the people in our lives—the freedom to choose the meaning of our experiences.
Developing New Neural Pathways
If we can learn to assign new meanings to stressful situations, we can actually avoid the biochemical and hormonal reactions that cause damage to our systems, especially with age. Recent cognitive research shows that our ability to change our attitudes and behaviors manifests neurologically, as well. Our brains retain their plasticity well into our Third Acts, and they can be rewired. When we react to a person or the memory of a person or event in a negative way over and over and over, it becomes woven into the fabric of our brain’s neural network, like a well-worn footpath that grows deeper over time. The footpaths are not structural; they are patterns made by electrical and chemical signals that are sent via neurotransmitters to parts of the brain’s hundreds of billions of cells, or neurons; the neurons get into the habit of interacting in certain patterns. But when we change our reactions through new insight, experiences, cognitive therapy, or mediation, no matter how old we are, a neural-pathway shift can occur; the signals can change direction. If we can manage to maintain the new, positive interpretation of the person or event, this new pathway will win out over the formerly hardwired memory. We may not be able to change what happened, but we can change our feelings about it. This is humankind’s ultimate freedom!
The possibility of treading new neural pathways through the landscape of the past is in itself a worthwhile endeavor as a way to grow, to develop your character, to become whole. What a potentially precious gift doing a life review can be, for ourselves! And, perhaps, for our relatives and children (should we choose to write it down and show it to them): not writing a history for the purpose of impressing or pleasing or reassuring, but to tell our own real story. Our truth may help set our children free. And it will surely help us shape a strong Third Act, one built on a foundation of truth—about who we are and have, actually, always been.
CHAPTER 3
Act I: A Time for Gathering
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
—T. S. ELIOT, Four Quartets
I must have been about eight years old here.
THE FIRST ACT OF OUR LIVES, AS I SEE IT, BEGINS AT BIRTH AND lasts for twenty-nine years. Originally, I called the First Act “Gathering” because it is the stage when we gather together the ingredients—the tools, the skills, the scars—that make us uniquely us, the elements we will spend Acts II and III recovering from but also building on. In terms of the passage above from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Act I is the “place” we come back to after all our exploring, and, because we are laden with experience and perhaps forgiveness and wisdom, we see it and understand it for the first time. This is why it is important, in a life review, to visualize and reflect on who we were back then and what that can teach us about who we are now and what we want to focus on going forward. Often, by doing so, we can make our present life better.
Unhappy Childhoods Can Fade Away
Interestingly, I discovered research that indicates that whether our childhoods were happy or miserable is not all that important in later life. Dr. George Vaillant, a psychiatrist and researcher, is the director of the thirty-year-long Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the most important studies ever done about aging and why