Prime Time - Jane Fonda [30]
Before now, most of us have been defined by others—our husbands, our children, our parents, our jobs. Now the time comes when we can begin to define ourselves. I knew I was ready, I just didn’t know what form the definition would take.
This was not my first fertile void, and I knew what to do: nothing. For a couple of months I raked the leaves in my daughter’s yard, and friends came to see me. I found refuge in a black Baptist church (until the press followed me there), where the soulful preaching and stirring gospel singing lifted my spirit. I went to occasional meetings of the organization I had founded seven years earlier, the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention. I listened to classical music and read books by the psychologists Carol Gilligan and Marion Woodman. I prayed regularly, dabbled in meditation, made a point of breathing deeply, and waited for the wind to take me, this time with my sails fully hoisted.
This time it was Oprah Winfrey who sailed into my harbor. She’d come to interview me for the second issue of her just-launched magazine, O. Clearly, my digs weren’t what she’d expected, as she pulled up in a stretch limousine, totally incongruous in that neighborhood. “Gee, didn’t Ted buy you a swank condo?” she asked, bewildered, as she walked into the modest living room. “He probably would have if I’d asked, but I didn’t. I like it here,” I explained, “I’m starting over.” In that interview I told Oprah about preparing for my Third Act and what that felt like, and, in verbalizing it, I saw clearly the gendered theme that ran through my life: the need to please, to leave myself behind so as to be loved, the feelings of never being good enough, the difficulty with “no.” As I thought about it more in the ensuing days, I was struck by how crystal clear my thinking was. New ideas came to me, but not because I was trying to figure something out; they just appeared.
With Oprah, the day she came and interviewed me in my daughter’s Atlanta home, just after Ted Turner and I split up.
RICHARD PHIBBS/ART DEPT
True ideas have always seemed to ambush me when I least expect them. Just when I’m meandering along, paying no heed to my flanks and rear, a true idea will float out of the sky, hit me on top of my head, and change the color of my life. And one of those true things was the idea to write My Life So Far. There it was. So simple. This is what I would do and how I would figure out my next decades. My life hasn’t been a representative one, but I was sure the themes that ran through it were universal enough to resonate with others and that if I could write it deeply, below the surface it could provide a road map for others. This would be for them and for me—a deeper, fuller life review than what I had put together for my sixtieth birthday. One that would help me—not to grow old but to grow into myself, and into Act 111.
CHAPTER 5
Eleven Ingredients for Successful Aging
Whether we live to a vigorous old age lies not so much in our stars or our genes as in ourselves.
—GEORGE VAILLANT1
My fish.
WOODY ALLEN ONCE SAID, “I DON’T WANT TO ACHIEVE IMMORTALITY through my work. I’d rather achieve it by not dying.” Sorry about that, Woody. It doesn’t appear that science will ever change that reality of human life. (Though in Appendix I you will learn what is being done in that arena.) What’s needed, therefore, when it comes to issues of physical aging, is a shift in thinking, from a focus on life span or life expectancy to a focus on health span or health expectancy … getting to the end in better shape, since we cannot change the end itself!
Earlier, I described the old paradigm of physical aging as an arch. Now there is a new metaphor