Prime Time - Jane Fonda [33]
Jane Lynch of Glee fame helping me warm up the crowd before Maria Shriver’s march to defeat Alzheimer’s disease, 2010.
FREDERICK M. BROWN/GETTY IMAGES
Chapter 17, “Ripening the Time,” further develops this concept.
The ingredients that keep us vital, happy, and continuing to grow are there for a majority of us. During our last three decades, as we move from being the “young old” to becoming the “old old,” we can have some of the best years of our lives, and the best news of all is that it is never too late to start making it so. A lot of it—most of it—has to do with lifestyle choices we make and how willing we are to live with real intention, instead of just drifting.
Lifestyle Choices
Genes may predispose us to, say, heart disease or arthritis, but the right lifestyle and the right attitude may help us overcome these infirmities. I know older people who are disabled and even ill but who do not feel sick. They experience joy and vitality and, in my opinion, exemplify successful aging. Some of the lifestyle and attitudinal choices we can make are best addressed before we enter our Third Acts. But even if we decide to change our ways after sixty, we can still make a big difference in how we age.
In the chapters that follow, I go into more depth about how I and others have incorporated these ingredients into our own lives, and how you might do the same.
CHAPTER 6
The Workout
It’s not that very old people … can exercise because they are healthy … rather, they achieve a healthy old age because they exercise.
—JANE BRODY, New York Times HEALTH WRITER
I’ve been screaming at the top of my lungs at my family, “Work out! Work out! Old age is coming!” At some point you will need the strength. Who would have ever thought you would get this old?
—CHER
Dad as a young actor. My only proof that he sometimes worked out.
ONE DAY, AT AGE FIFTY-NINE, I WAS DRIVING WITH TED TURNER to one of his ranches in Patagonia when we came around a corner and I caught sight of the most magnificent snowcapped mountain I had ever seen, a perfectly symmetrical extinct volcano named Mount Lanin, rising straight up from the flat pampas to twelve thousand feet. Right then I vowed to climb that mountain as a present to myself for my sixtieth birthday.
My stepson Beau Turner said he’d go with me, along with two guides. I trained for several months, bought the needed gear to scale the glacier that composed the top two thousand feet, and off we went. We camped overnight in a blizzard at about ten thousand feet, getting up before dawn in order to make the rest of the ascent and get back down before nightfall. I was totally psyched as we set out in the dark. My heart was pounding with the exertion of hiking through the thigh-deep snow at that altitude, and I felt great about being out ahead of everyone else. One of the guides shouted, “Don’t go too fast, Jane, you’ll sweat,” but I wanted to prove (to myself, mostly) that a sixty-year-old woman still had her mojo. Stupid me. A thousand feet from the top I had to turn around. Just as the guide had warned, the sweaty, damp inner layer of clothing—evidence of my ego—had gotten cold, and my plummeting body temperature put me at risk of hypothermia.
On his way down from the top, Beau picked me up at the mid-mountain campsite and regaled me with descriptions of what it had been like to scale the ice at the summit. I felt like such a failure.
You’d have thought I’d learned my lesson. Right? Wrong! For my seventieth birthday, I wanted to climb to sixteen thousand feet (two thousand feet higher than I had ever been). But I learned that you can’t get that high without getting very cold, and I don’t do cold well.
My boyfriend at the time liked scuba diving and suggested that, instead of going