A Letter from Jane FondaIn my memoir, My Life So Far, I defined my life in three acts: Act I, from birth to 29 years; Act II, from 30 to 59 years; and Act III, from 60 until the end. It really seemed to resonate with people, and a few years after the book came out, my editor at Random House, Kate Medina, came to me and suggested I write a book focusing more on the Third Act. I was interested in doing this because I was already well into my Third Act and relished the challenge to dig deeper, to understand its meaning, to learn how to make the most of it, and to navigate the inevitable challenges of aging--what is negotiable and what isn't.
Third Acts are important. They can make sense out of what may seem like discordant, confusing First Acts. Third Acts can, if we think about it, allow us to discover who we really are. Entered with intention, Third Acts can help us become midwives to ourselves before we die.
I knew that this exploration is especially important now, because in the last century, the average life expectancy has expanded by 35 years! Think about it: At the time of our founding fathers, the average person died at around 35 years of age. Now we can expect to live, on average, 80 years! An entire second adult lifetime! This amazing gift of time means that Third Acts have gained a whole new significance.
Yet we are pioneers within this new reality. We need a road map to show us how to navigate the new terrain. I wanted to create this roadmap--for myself, as well as for my readers. We who are approaching our Third Acts (or are already in the midst of them, as I am), can show the way for those coming up--our children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews.
We are still living with the old paradigm of aging, which can best be described as an arch: We are born, we peak at midlife, and then decline--age as pathology.
While researching my book, I discovered another paradigm, one that is far more appropriate given the longevity revolution. It is the image of a staircase, an upward ascension until the end--age as potential--for wisdom, authenticity, and wholeness.
This metaphor for aging is one that I myself am experiencing, and I wanted to understand why this is so and write about it. Yes, my body is experiencing the effects of age, but after coming through a very difficult, painful midlife, I find that I am happier, more peaceful, and more content than I have ever been. My relationships are deeper and less anxious. I find this is true, by the way, for most of my older friends. This was not at all what I had expected at this stage of life! Yes, we forget things, but we also remember a lot and with more vividness now because we know why we want to remember them. Yes, we lose eyesight, but we gain insight. We learn what we need and what to let go of. We tend to make lemons into lemonade instead of mountains out of molehills. Scientists call this the Positivity Factor and their research shows it to be the case for most women and men over 50, regardless of their circumstances, even in the face of physical challenges. How, I wanted to know, can we ensure this is true for us?
I sat myself down and made a list of all the things I wanted to know about aging, from sex to exercise; from nutrition to wisdom. A to Z. I talked to scientists, doctors, priests. To centenarians. To men and women in long-term marriages, and those who were looking for love or needing a way out of loneliness. I write about my own experiences and much more.
I realized that to better navigate our Third Act, we benefit by reviewing the first two acts. I call this doing a Life Review, and it can profoundly alter our understanding of ourselves, our past, and what we need to do to complete ourselves as we ascend the staircase to the end. This is why Prime Time includes a discussion of Acts I and II and the developmental issues that lie within each of them, as well as questions you can ask yourself about how you were at those times. Understanding these things can help you swing into your Third Act as prepared as possible to make it your Prime Time.
About the Author
Jane Fonda is an Oscar- and Emmy-winning actress and highly successful producer. She revolutionized the fitness industry with the Jane Fonda Workout in 1982 and has sold more than seventeen million copies of her fitness-focused books, videos, and recordings. She is involved with several causes and is the founder of both the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention and the Jane Fonda Center at Emory University. She is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller My Life So Far, and she received a Tony nomination in 2009 for her role in 33 Variations. She lives in Los Angeles.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PREFACE
The Arch and the Staircase
The past empowers the present, and the groping
footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways
to the future.
—Mary Catherine Bateson
Several years ago, i was coming to the end of my sixties
and facing my seventies, the second decade of what I thought of as
the Third Act of my life— Act III, which, as I see it, begins at age
sixty. I was worried. Being in my sixties was one thing. Given good
health, we can fudge our sixties. But seventy—now, that’s serious.
In our grandparents’ time, people in their seventies were considered
part of the “old old” . . . on their way out.
However, a revolution has occurred within the last century—
a longevity revolution. Studies show that, on average, thirty- four
years have been added to human life expectancy, moving it from an
average of forty- six years to eighty! This addition represents an
entire second adult lifetime, and whether we choose to confront it
or not, it changes everything, including what it means to be human.
Adding a Room
The social anthropologist (and a friend of mine) Mary Catherine
Bateson has a metaphor for living with this longer life span in view.
She writes in her recent book Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active
Wisdom, “We have not added decades to life expectancy by simply
extending old age; instead, we have opened up a new space partway
through the life course, a second and different kind of adulthood
that precedes old age, and as a result every stage of life is undergoing
change.” Bateson uses the identifi able metaphor of what happens
when a new room is added to your home. It isn’t just the new
room that is different; every other part of the house and how it is
used is altered a bit by the addition of this room.
In the house that is our life, things such as planning, marriage,
love, fi nances, parenting, travel, education, physical fi tness, work,
retirement—our very identities, even!—all take on new meaning
now that we can expect to be vital into our eighties and nineties
. . . or longer.
But our culture has not come to grips with the ways the longevity
revolution has altered our lives. Institutionally, so much of how
we do things is the same as it was early in the twentieth century,
with our lives segregated into age- specifi c silos: During the fi rst
third we learn, during the second third we produce, and the last
third we presumably spend on leisure. Consider, instead, how it
would look if we tore down the silos and integrated the activities.
For example, let’s begin to think of learning and working as a lifelong
challenge instead of something that ends when you retire.
What if the wonderfully empowering feeling of being productive
can be experienced by children early in life, and if they know from
fi rst grade that education will be an expected part of their entire
lives? What if the second, traditionally productive silo is braided
with leisure and education? And seniors, with twenty or more productive
years left, can enjoy leisure time while remaining in the
workforce in some form and attending to education if for no other
reason than to challenge their minds? Envisioned this way, longevity
becomes like a symphony with echoes of different times recurring
with slight modifi cations, as in music, across the life arc.
Except that we don’t have the sheet music to this new symphony.
We— today’s boomers and seniors— are the pioneer generations,
the ones who need to compose together a template for how
to maximize the potential of this amazing gift of time, so as to
become whole, fully realized people over the longer life arc.
In attempting to chart a course for myself into my sixties and
beyond, I’ve found it helpful to view the symphony of my own life
in three acts, or three major developmental stages: Act I, the fi rst
three decades; Act II, the middle three decades; and Act III, the
fi nal three decades (or however many more years one is granted).
As I searched for ways to understand the new realities of aging,
I discovered the arch and the staircase.
The Arch and the Staircase
Here you see two diagrams that I have had drawn, because they
make visualizable two conceptions of human life that have come to
mean a lot to me.
One diagram, the arch, represents a biological concept, taking
us from childhood to a middle peak of maturity, followed by a
decline into infi rmity.
The other, a staircase, shows our potential for upward progression
toward wisdom, spiritual growth, learning— toward, in other
words, consciousness and soul.
The vision behind these diagrams was developed by Rudolf Arnheim,
the late professor emeritus of the psychology of art at Harvard
University, and for me they are clear metaphors for ways we can choose
to view aging. Our youth- obsessed culture encourages us to focus
on the arch—age as physical decline— more than on the stairway— age
as potential for continued development and ascent. But it is the stairway
that points to late life’s promise, even in the face of physical
decline. Perhaps it should be a spiral staircase! Because the wisdom,
balance, refl ection, and compassion that this upward movement represents
don’t just come to us in one linear ascension; they circle around
us, beckoning us to keep climbing, to keep looking both back and
ahead.
Rehearsing the Future
Throughout my life, whenever I was confronted by something I
feared, I tried to make it my best friend, stare it in the face, and get
to know its ins and outs. Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “You gain
strength, courage, and confi dence by every experience in which you
really stop to look fear in the face.” I have found this to be true.
This is how I discovered that knowledge about what lies ahead can
empower me, help me conquer my fears, take the wind out of the
sails of my anxiety. Know thine enemy! Remember Rumpelstiltskin,
the evil dwarf in the Grimms’ fairy tale? He was destroyed
once the miller’s daughter learned his name and called it out. When
we name our fears, bring them out into the open, and examine
them in the light, they weaken and wither.
So, one of the ways I have tried to overcome my fears of aging
involved rehearsing for it. In fact, I started doing this in Act II. I
believe that this rehearsal for the future (along with doing a life
review of the past) is part of why I have been able— so far— to live
Act III with relative equanimity.
Being with my father when he was in his late seventies and in
decline due to heart problems was what began to shatter any childhood
illusions I’d had of immortality. I was in my mid- forties, and it
hit me that with him gone, I would be the oldest one left in the family
and, before too long, next at the turnstile. I realized then that it was
not so much the idea of death itself that frightened me as it was being
faced with regrets, the “what if”s and the “if only”s when there is no
time left to do anything about them. I didn’t want to arrive at the end
of the Third Act and discover too late all that I had not done.
I began to feel the need to project myself into the future, to
visualize who I wanted to be and what regrets I might have that I
would need to address before I got too old. I wanted to understand
as much as possible what cards age would deal me; what I could
realistically expect of myself physically; how much of aging was
negotiable; and what I needed to do to intervene on my own behalf
with what appeared to be a downward slope.
The birth of my two children had taught me the importance of
knowledge and preparation. The fi rst birth had been a terrifying,
lonely experience; I went through it unprepared and unrehearsed,
swept along passively in a sea of pain. The second birth was quite
the opposite. My husband and I worked with a birth educator in
the months leading up to my due date, so that I was able to visualize
what would happen and know what to do. The physical ordeal
was no less grueling, the process no faster, but the experience itself
was transformed. With knowledge and rehearsal, I found it easier
to ride atop the sequence of events rather than be totally submerged
by the pain.
I brought what I’d learned from childbirth to my experience
facing late midlife. As I said, I was scared back then— it is hard to
let go of children, of the success that came with youth, of old identities
when new ones aren’t yet clearly defi ned. I felt I could choose
whether to be blindly propelled into later life, in denial with my
eyes wide shut, or I could take charge and seek out what I needed
to know in order to make informed decisions in the many changing
areas of my life. That’s why, in 1984, at age forty- six, before I’d even
had my fi rst hot fl ash, I wrote Women Coming of Age, with Mignon
McCarthy, about what women can expect, physically, as they age,
and what parts of aging are negotiable. It was a way to force myself
to confront and rehearse the future. I was shocked to discover how
little research had been devoted to women’s health. Most medical
studies I found had been done on men. I’m happy to say this has
started to change.
At forty- six, I began to envision the old woman I wished to be,
and I described her in that book:
I see an old woman wal...
