by Jane Fonda
People told me to stay busy, and this was, in fact, my usual way of dealing with times of uncertainty. “If I just keep moving,” I’d always thought, “no one, including me, will notice that I’m stuck … maybe.” But as Suzanne Braun Levine, who writes extensively about women’s issues, has said, “The cure for ‘stuck’ is ‘still.’ ”2 I sensed that time wasn’t just an empty space asking me to fill it with something. Time just was, and its was-ness was asking me to simply be in it—fully.
I sat alone most days in the company of my golden retriever, reading books such as Riane Eisler’s transformational The Chalice and the Blade, about Neolithic societies that practiced goddess worship and the rise of patriarchy that crushed it, and psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled, about what makes for a fulfilled human being. I knew I was raw and vulnerable, so I stayed close to the wall, and avoided movies that weren’t uplifting, people who weren’t loving and positive, music that didn’t soothe. My survival instinct motivated me to keep a fairly regular exercise routine in order to boost my endorphin levels and remind myself I did actually exist. If I’m sore, I must exist.
The Fertile Void
After a while I sensed changes happening within and around me. It occurred to me that this was similar to what happens to actors as they draw closer to the time when they have to play a new role. They begin to morph into a new character, but who they’re morphing into hasn’t fully taken shape. This place between who they are and who they will become can be a time of vulnerability, but also one of tremendous creative ferment, when care and attention are called for. Many smart people have delved into the meaning these transitions hold for our lives. The organizational consultant William Bridges calls it the “neutral zone.” The philosopher Viktor Frankl called it the “existential vacuum.” For Donna Henes, it’s “sitting in the shadows.” The metaphor I prefer is Braun Levine’s “fertile void,” a space of “unremitting unknowingness.”3 “Fertile” is good because it emphasizes the potential for growth, and “void” feels emptier and more neutral than “zone” or “vacuum.” It is in the fertile void that tendrils of something new can begin to sprout—if you surrender to it and don’t numb yourself with busyness.
Turns out, the potentials that lie within the fertile void are paralleled within the natural world. Several years after my painful midlife transition, an ecologist in southern Georgia told me that it is in the zones where one ecosystem ends and another begins that one finds the richest, most exciting diversity of life. And quantum physics says that “the closer a system can move to the edge of chaos, the more creativity and ‘option space’ exists.” I like that—“option space.” That’s exactly what the fertile void is: a space where, if you just quiet down and go with the flow, options open themselves.
Maybe the fundamental arrangements of your life have dissolved through no fault of your own and you have to totally rethink how you live in relation to your life. You may have to scale way back or start from scratch. Maybe there has not been an objective, life-altering crisis, such as a divorce or death, but your children are moving on and age is making you vulnerable to forced retirement and the subsequent loss of the clear, defining structure you’ve relied on, the office routine and performance reports that for professionals provide concrete proof of “productivity.”
Redefining Productivity
Maybe this is the time to begin redefining what we mean by “productive.” What was productive in youth may now hold us back from entering the “option space” and achieving new and as yet unrecognized potential. Our reproductivity may be over, but who says our productivity went with it? Goethe wrote, “Whoever, in midlife, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a [person’s] life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.” I think every seven years is actually more like it. The play (and later movie) The Seven Year Itch may have been a comedy, but the underlying premise was very real. Every seven years—give or take a year on either side—all our cells are renewed, and we are apt go through important transitions around this time. Many cultures throughout history have recognized seven as a defining, transitional number. In relationships, if the two partners are not transitioning in ways that sympathetically echo each other’s, troubles can ensue. I was very aware of this around the seventh or eighth year in each of my three marriages.
But our time in the fertile void can be more than just figuring out new hopes and goals and worrying about what is going to happen to us. This uncomfortable limbo can offer, in the words of the Zen priest Joan Halifax, “an opportunity to exchange the wish to control life for a willingness to engage in living.”4 No act of will can make this happen. We must have the courage to just be, to not feel pressure to set big goals but to let the grounding we used to find in people’s praise for our work now come from within us. We may feel we are broken when, in fact, we are being broken open. For women in midlife, the void is fertile because we are becoming midwives to our new selves.
In fact, the fertile void may be an optimum time to do a life review—when you can feel that change is happening, and when parents and even grandparents may still be living and available to be interviewed. Such a review may help you heal from the challenges you experienced in childhood. As William Bridges, who specializes in understanding transitions, wrote, “The past isn’t like a landscape or a vase of flowers that is just there. It is more like the raw material awaiting a builder.”5 Maybe, by doing a life review, you will build a ladder out of the void, the way I did a decade later … when I was sixty, not fifty.
A Rite of Passage to Act III
Painful though this in-between time might be, it can also be a rite of passage into the Third Act. Then all you need do is stay mentally and physically healthy and put up the sails. If our sails are up, in time the wind will come and take us where we will go, where we are meant to be.
I hadn’t quite finished hoisting my sails when my third husband, Ted Turner, Captain America himself, sailed boisterously into the harbor. Those who knew him were sure my sails would be luffing forever in his wake, but he needed me and wasn’t afraid to show it, and this gave me confidence. Besides, I wasn’t ready yet to do life solo. I wanted and needed to try again to be a whole person within the context of a marriage, and we were well suited for each other on many levels. I wanted it to work with him so much that I did what I had not done previously: I went into therapy.
Ted, my stepdaughter Nathalie Vadim, me, and Vanessa in 1991 at our wedding.
BARBARA PYLE
With Ted in 1997.
We separated after ten years of marriage, when I was sixty-two. It had taken me eight years to grudgingly realize that I would not be able to be healthy and authentic within the confines of that marriage, and then two more years after that to get the courage to say so. Oddly enough, it was the preparation for my sixtieth birthday and the confidence that this brought me that exposed the extent to which I needed to renegotiate the terms of our marriage. Those two post-sixty years were difficult, and I felt myself sinking into numbness. Unlike the malaise I had experienced more than a decade earlier, in my second marriage, this was not a matter of my hormones; this was a matter of my humanity. I saw that as I entered my last act, I’d have less time to squander. Fish or cut bait.
It was terrifying. I had abandoned my professional career ten years earlier, and at sixty-two I knew it was unlikely, given Hollywood’s proclivity for young flesh, that I could reclaim it—nor was I interested, just then, in doing so. But who would I be now, and in the years ahead? I had been married—to one man or another—for most of my adult life, and had drawn my identity from men. The very thought of going it alone had always filled me with profound dread.
I vividly remember the moment I realized the marriage to Ted was not going to work. I stood before him and I knew I had a choice: I could opt for safety or try for integrity. I thought of Virginia Woolf, who wrote about the angel in her house, the hovering Victorian angel who
would whisper into her ear as she wrote the lines so inspirational to future feminists, words to the effect of “Tsk tsk, Virginia, nice women would never say that.” On my right shoulder I heard an angel whisper with great certainty, “Oh, come on, Fonda, lighten up. You know how they always say you have no sense of humor. You’re so serious. He’s cute and smart and funny and he has all these incredibly beautiful properties and you’ll never have to work and …” while on the other shoulder, barely audible, was another angel whispering, “Jane, you know what’s right. This is your life. You can die married and safe, sure, but you won’t die whole, and you’ll regret it. You did all that work preparing for your sixtieth birthday so you’d know how to live your last act. Well, this is it, kiddo, and it isn’t a dress rehearsal.” It felt like letting go of a trapeze without a net under me.
When the parting finally happened, I took my golden retriever and moved in with my daughter, Vanessa, who had a home in what was then a relatively modest part of Atlanta. It was funny, actually. As I wrote in my memoirs, I went “from twenty-three kingdom-sized properties and a private plane that could sleep six to a small guest room with no closet.” And that time was wonderful, scary but wonderful, because it felt like I was stripped down to rawness and reality, which is just where I needed to be in order to allow a truer me to emerge. It felt right that the womb of this transition was in the home of my firstborn. It was a bittersweet time, a time of beginnings and endings. Vanessa had just had her first baby, this was her first home, and yet her father, the French film director Roger Vadim, was in Paris dying of cancer. In fact, when I first moved in, she was with him in Paris, and so the silence and aloneness that surrounded me was abrupt and total. I relished it. Here I was in another fertile void. Alongside the mourning over what could have been with Ted, I could feel something happening. I was terrified, but I knew that all the work I had done on myself to try to save the marriage and my preparations for the start of my Third Act had borne fruit. These things hadn’t saved the marriage, but they had saved me. Giving birth to ourselves before we die is definitely something to work for. Around that time, I read a quote that stuck with me: “Sooner or later we will come to the edge of all that we cannot control and find life, waiting there for us.”
The psychologist Marion Woodman says that within “vulnerability lives the humility that allows flesh to soften into the sounds of the soul.”6 I experienced the truth of this during those aching weeks alone in Vanessa’s home. A space began to open, allowing me access to another wavelength beyond consciousness. It wasn’t something that came to me through thought. If I had to locate it somewhere, it would be in my body. I could feel myself moving back into myself, becoming whole, awakened. I sensed at the time that this was God.
Being Perfect
All my life I had believed that unless I was perfect I would not be loved. This had engendered a futile struggle, since we aren’t meant to be perfect, and it had gotten me into a lot of trouble—like silencing the parts of myself that didn’t seem good enough, and developing eating disorders. In fact, I now think it was this long-standing disease to please that had prevented me all along from being whole. Why inhabit yourself if yourself is yucky? Recently, I was excited to read in William Bridges’s The Way of Transition that in Matthew 5:48, when Jesus tells his disciples, “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” there is a mistranslation of the Greek adjective teleios, which actually means “whole, fully formed, fully developed.”7 Jesus wasn’t telling his disciples to be perfect, like God; he was telling them to be whole, like God.
I am grateful that this feeling of becoming whole occurred later in life, when I could experience it consciously. Now that we’re living longer, being a late bloomer has a lot of advantages. Maybe some people are intact spirits from the beginning, and maybe it happens to others in early life. But it’s glorious to be at an age when you are aware that it’s happening, that you worked for it, and that you’re on the right path. For the first time as an adult, I was without a man in my life yet felt whole, rather than like a half a person waiting to be completed.
I was going through what Gail Sheehy in Sex and the Seasoned Woman calls the passage “from pleasing to mastery.”8 This time can be the hallmark of our Third Acts, the mirror opposite of our first major life transition, in adolescence, which sent us careening from mastery to pleasing, turning us from, as I have heard Gloria Steinem say, “a confident child who’s been climbing trees and saying, ‘It’s not fair,’ into a self-doubting teenager who prefaces her thoughts with ‘It’s probably only me but …’ ”
Before now, most of us have been defined by others—our husbands, our children, our parents, our jobs. Now the time comes when we can begin to define ourselves. I knew I was ready, I just didn’t know what form the definition would take.
This was not my first fertile void, and I knew what to do: nothing. For a couple of months I raked the leaves in my daughter’s yard, and friends came to see me. I found refuge in a black Baptist church (until the press followed me there), where the soulful preaching and stirring gospel singing lifted my spirit. I went to occasional meetings of the organization I had founded seven years earlier, the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention. I listened to classical music and read books by the psychologists Carol Gilligan and Marion Woodman. I prayed regularly, dabbled in meditation, made a point of breathing deeply, and waited for the wind to take me, this time with my sails fully hoisted.
This time it was Oprah Winfrey who sailed into my harbor. She’d come to interview me for the second issue of her just-launched magazine, O. Clearly, my digs weren’t what she’d expected, as she pulled up in a stretch limousine, totally incongruous in that neighborhood. “Gee, didn’t Ted buy you a swank condo?” she asked, bewildered, as she walked into the modest living room. “He probably would have if I’d asked, but I didn’t. I like it here,” I explained, “I’m starting over.” In that interview I told Oprah about preparing for my Third Act and what that felt like, and, in verbalizing it, I saw clearly the gendered theme that ran through my life: the need to please, to leave myself behind so as to be loved, the feelings of never being good enough, the difficulty with “no.” As I thought about it more in the ensuing days, I was struck by how crystal clear my thinking was. New ideas came to me, but not because I was trying to figure something out; they just appeared.
With Oprah, the day she came and interviewed me in my daughter’s Atlanta home, just after Ted Turner and I split up.
RICHARD PHIBBS/ART DEPT
True ideas have always seemed to ambush me when I least expect them. Just when I’m meandering along, paying no heed to my flanks and rear, a true idea will float out of the sky, hit me on top of my head, and change the color of my life. And one of those true things was the idea to write My Life So Far. There it was. So simple. This is what I would do and how I would figure out my next decades. My life hasn’t been a representative one, but I was sure the themes that ran through it were universal enough to resonate with others and that if I could write it deeply, below the surface it could provide a road map for others. This would be for them and for me—a deeper, fuller life review than what I had put together for my sixtieth birthday. One that would help me—not to grow old but to grow into myself, and into Act 111.
CHAPTER 5
Eleven Ingredients for Successful Aging
Whether we live to a vigorous old age lies not so much in our stars or our genes as in ourselves.
—GEORGE VAILLANT1
My fish.
WOODY ALLEN ONCE SAID, “I DON’T WANT TO ACHIEVE IMMORTALITY through my work. I’d rather achieve it by not dying.” Sorry about that, Woody. It doesn’t appear that science will ever change that reality of human life. (Though in Appendix I you will learn what is being done in that arena.) What’s needed, therefore, when it comes to issues of physical aging, is a shift in thinking, from a focus on life span or life expectancy to a focus on health span or health expectancy … getting to t
he end in better shape, since we cannot change the end itself!
Earlier, I described the old paradigm of physical aging as an arch. Now there is a new metaphor for successful physical aging that focuses less on decline. This is the one that we can strive for. It is life as a rectangle—the top half of a rectangle, that is. We’re born; then we live a long, level, and healthy stretch of time. No rise and then a slow, gradual decline. Rather, there is a steep, sudden drop-off at the far end, right before we go.
This rectangular metaphor for physical aging is the new goal.
Dr. Tom Kirkwood came up with a term for this drop-off at the end of the rectangle: the “compression of morbidity.” “We want to squeeze the bad things that happen to us at the end of life into as short a period as possible while leaving the life span as it is,” says Kirkwood, who is a professor of medicine and the head of the Department of Gerontology at the University of Newcastle.2
The Eleven Ingredients
There are eleven ingredients that can help us age successfully—physically, emotionally, and psychologically. All of them are within our power to do something about. Listed below, they reflect the findings from a number of important studies and books, most notably the MacArthur Foundation Study of Successful Aging, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, and the writings of Dr. Robert Butler, the late president and CEO of the International Longevity Center in New York. Some of these ideas were given to me by the experts I interviewed, and in the following chapters I discuss each of them, with illustrative stories from the lives of my friends and from my own life.
