Prime Time - Jane Fonda [5]
Part Four is also about the importance of facing our mortality and planning for late life—emotionally, financially, legally, and in terms of what we can do, individually and together, to make our society more supportive of seniors and help create a happier environment for them.
Part Five shows us how learning to go inward—spiritually and metaphysically—allows us to look outward with new eyes.
And so let’s begin.
CHAPTER 1
Act III: Becoming Whole
The greatest potential for growth and self-realization exists in the second half of life.
—CARL JUNG
Tulea and me during our “Broadway Series” skit in 2009.
HOW OLD DO YOU FEEL?” SOMEONE ASKED ME RECENTLY. I THOUGHT for a moment before answering. I wanted to really consider the question and not give a glib “I feel forty” sort of answer. “I feel seventy,” I said, remembering a retort of Pablo Picasso’s: “It takes a long time to become young.”
Ageism
A while back, I spoke to a group of adolescent girls, and when I mentioned my age, some of them winced. They whispered to me that I should not let on how old I was, because I didn’t look seventy. They meant this to be a compliment, but I found it sad and a little scary. Like a lot of us when we were their age, and like our culture in general, these young women viewed age as something to hide, as if youth were the pinnacle of life. Well, maybe it is the pinnacle in terms of body tautness or sperm and egg count or thickness of cartilage and bilateral activation of the parahippocampal gyrus! But I’m not the only one who wouldn’t want to go back to adolescence—not for anything! It’s too hard! There’s too much anxiety about trying to fit in! I also wouldn’t care to repeat my twenties and thirties, for that matter. For me, those years were too fraught with trying to make my mark. And heaven forbid, let’s not repeat the “in between” time of the late forties and early fifties.
Richard and me on the red carpet at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party, 2011.
CRAIG BARRITT/GETTY IMAGES
For me, the “good old days” were really the “so-so old days.” I spent far too much time worrying that I wasn’t good enough, smart enough, thin enough, talented enough. I can honestly say that in terms of feelings of well-being, right now is the best time of my life. All those enoughnesses I worried about just don’t matter as much anymore. I have come to believe that when you’re actually inside oldness, as opposed to anticipating it from the outside, the fear subsides. You discover that you are still yourself, probably even more so.
For me, right now, this time in my life feels like I am beginning to become who I was meant to be all along. Act III isn’t at all what I expected. I never envisioned myself as a happy, learning-to-be-wise older woman.
It didn’t just happen. I have worked at it. I have been fortunate in myriad ways, and I have (sometimes despite myself) done what I needed to do to make the most of what I was given.
In society’s terms I may be seen as “over the hill,” but I’ve discovered a new, different, challenging landscape on the other side—a landscape filled with new depths of love, new ways of interacting with friends and strangers, new ways of expressing myself and facing setbacks, and, by the way, more hills … literally.
Hiking Machu Picchu in 2000.
Carl Jung pondered whether “the afternoon of human life [was] merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning” or if it had a significance of its own.1
I believe that Rudolf Arnheim’s diagrams of the arch and the staircase (which I wrote about in the Preface) answer Jung’s question perfectly. Yes, Act III has its own significance! This is when we are meant to go deeper, to become whole. It is the time to move from ego to soul, as the spiritual teacher Ram Dass says.
Professor Arnheim further illustrated his