Prime Time - Jane Fonda [7]
In an unpublished essay, Mr. Selinger described what he felt happening to him. “As my muscles weakened, my writing became stronger. As I slowly lost my speech, I gained my voice. As I diminished, I grew. As I lost so much, I finally started to find myself.”
Selinger’s writing teacher, Steve Lewis, says that his student has had to lose his lawyer’s voice and that “he’s got sort of a Zen countenance now. And it’s reflected in what he writes. He doesn’t duck anger and despair, he doesn’t duck anything, but it’s all there without self-pity. His writing is richer because his experience of the moment is richer.” Neil Selinger is the embodiment of mounting the Third Act staircase!
Slowing Down
Unlike during childhood, Act III is a quiet ripening. It takes time and experience and, yes, perhaps the inevitable slowing down.
You have to learn to sort out what’s fundamentally important to you from what’s irrelevant. A life review, which we’ll take up in the next chapter, can help you do this.
Letting Go of What’s No Longer Needed:
Flexibility and the Shift from Ego to Soul
My brother, Peter, once pointed out to me that on the Fonda family crest is the word perseverate, Latin for “persevere.” We have been proud, my brother and I, over the years, of our perseverance through some challenging times.
While I still appreciate the value of persistence, it occurs to me that in the Third Act, part of the shift from ego to soul requires flexibility more than perseverance—the flexibility, for instance, to take stock of who and what surround us and to see if maybe we should let some of it go.
Think about gardening. My daughter taught me that if I want to maximize the spring and summer blooms on the English lavender that fills my garden, I have to cut back the dead blooms of fall. Deadheading, it’s called (not the Jerry Garcia variety!). The Third Act is the time for deadheading. Like plants in the winter, we have less energy to spare trying to resurrect old, dead growth, trying to blow life into the escapades and behaviors of youth in order to prove we’re still young. I don’t want to become a hollow old fool, squandering my precious remaining life force on stuff that doesn’t serve this stage of life. It takes flexibility and a dose of courage to slough off the clutter, the gadgets, the obsessions, the pursuits, the whatever or whoever doesn’t resonate with who we are now or want to become. I understand now what it is that I really need to know and so am freer to discard the rest.
Sure, I forget things, but I also remember a whole lot of things with more vividness because I know why I want to remember them and what significance they have for my life. With age, as Stephen Levine says, we “lose memory but gain insight.”5 My time now is dependent on no one but myself, so I, myself, must be sure that the various tasks I choose to occupy my time are the right ones. I have no time to waste as I once did, going down wrong paths. If I want to make ripples, I better be sure I am throwing my pebbles into the right pond.
Getting to Essences
Like the Impressionists, by rendering life down to its concentrated essences, we can begin to live more lightly and to put our energies into activities and people who enrich what may be the only thing that still retains the capacity for growth—our spirit.
SPIRIT
It has been explained to me that soul is the substance of who a person is, while spirit