Prime Time - Jane Fonda [56]
Come to think of it, the oldest people I have interviewed for this book have one striking thing in common: a sense of humor. For instance, ninety-five-year-old Karl. When I asked him for his age, he said, “I don’t know how old I am, but I was around when the Dead Sea was only sick.” When 104-year-old Cal Evans was asked by a Denver reporter, “Have you lived in Denver all your life?” Cal laughed and answered, “Not yet, sonny.” And there was Jeanne Louise Calment of Arles, France, the longest-lived person on record. Born in 1875, she died at 122 years and four months. She is reported to have quipped at age 119, “I have only one wrinkle, and I am sitting on it.” At one of Jeanne’s last birthday parties, in Paris, a journalist said with great hesitancy in his voice, “Well, I guess I will see you next year,” to which she responded, “I don’t see why not; you look to be in pretty good health to me.”
The Zen priest Joan Halifax and I were discussing the various ways in which our bodies are starting to weaken. “Yes,” she said at age sixty-five, “on some level, certain aspects of my life are shrinking. But as they shrink, something else expands, and there seems to be this compensation.”
“Give me an example,” I said.
“Well, my sense of humor has expanded. My robustness has expanded. My tolerance and patience have expanded. My love of people and of my work and of the earth has expanded. Younger people tend to get more obsessed over little details,” Joan explained, “whereas older people tend to just find out what is important.”
At the Upaya Zen Center with Roshi Joan Halifax.
TERI THOMSON RANDALL
Roshi Joan Halifax, me, and Mary Catharine Bateson.
“They don’t sweat the small stuff,” I said.
“That’s right. And on the other side of the equation, I think aging has stripped away a lot of my fear.”
I had heard the same thing from the writer Erica Jong. “I am much more relaxed now,” Erica told me over lunch in her art-filled New York apartment. “I am much less uptight. I know that things are not personal. If somebody criticizes something I have written, if somebody says something vicious about me, I think it is funny and I think it’s about them, not about me. I hadn’t gotten there earlier. After Fear of Flying I nearly dried up and stopped writing because the attacks were so vicious.”
At a breakfast meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I told Dr. Marion Perlmutter about my own growing sense of peace and detachment. “I hate to even use that word, ‘detachment,’ ” I said, “because it can be interpreted as noncaring when, in fact, I do care about most things just as much as ever.”
Dr. Perlmutter, who is with the Department of Psychology at the the University of Michigan, answered me: “I understand. As a scientist, I not only know more things about the brain, but I appreciate more all of the things I do not know. It is that, perhaps, the appreciation of the limitations of our knowledge, that has us detach a little bit and maybe moves us to something spiritual. Knowing what you don’t know is the first stage of knowing. But I think that only in late life does that part of understanding kick in. And this, I think, helps us detach.”
Dr. George Vaillant, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, discovered that older people develop “mature defenses.” By this he means the ability to turn lemons into lemonade and to not turn molehills into mountains.2
Dr. Laura Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, says that while there are some older people who don’t show a “Positivity effect” at all, and some younger people who do, generally Positivity represents an important developmental shift, a way to approach life that is expressed through humor, gratitude, forgiveness, playfulness, creativeness, and flexibility. “Goals change as people age,” she told me. “There are so many what-ifs in the lives of younger people, whereas we are armed with a long backward look—‘this has happened before.’ ”
Dr. Perlmutter agrees that Positivity may be due to “the accumulation of perspective. The first time that something