Jane Fonda - Prime Time: Love, Health, Sex, Fitness, Friendship, Spirit--making the Most of All of Your Life

Jane Fondas Workout Book

Jane Fondas New Workout & Weight-Loss Program

Women Coming of Age (with Mignon McCarthy)

My Life So Far

Prime Time is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

No book can replace the diagnostic expertise and medical advice of a trusted physician. Please be certain to consult with your doctor before making any decisions that affect your health, particularly if you suffer from any medical condition or have any symptom that may require treatment. Note as well that this book proposes a program of exercise recommendations for the reader to follow. However, you should consult a qualified medical professional (and, if you are pregnant, your ob/gyn) before starting this or any other fitness program. As with any diet or exercise program, if at any time you experience any discomfort, stop immediately and consult your physician.

As of press time, the URLs displayed in this book link or refer to existing websites on the Internet. Random House, Inc., is not responsible for, and should not be deemed to endorse or recommend, any website other than its own or any content available on the Internet (including without limitation at any website, blog page, information page) that is not created by Random House.

Copyright 2011 by Jane Fonda
Illustrations copyright 2011 by Angela Martini

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Permission credits for previously published material are located on .

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Fonda, Jane
Prime time / by Jane Fonda.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64387-6
1. AgingPrevention. 2. AgingPsychological aspects. 3. Rejuvenation. 4. Fonda, Jane, 1937Health. 5. Motion picture actors and actressesUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
RA776.75.F655 2011 612.3dc22 2011007454

Part-title page credits: 2011 Brigitte Lacombe ()

www.atrandom.com

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The past empowers the present, and the groping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.

M ARY C ATHERINE B ATESON

S EVERAL 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 lifeAct 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 seventynow, thats serious. In our grandparents time, people in their seventies were considered part of the old oldon their way out.

However, a revolution has occurred within the last centurya 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.

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 Bateson uses the identifiable metaphor of what happens when a new room is added to your home. It isnt 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, finances, parenting, travel, education, physical fitness, work, retirementour 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-specific silos: During the first 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, lets 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 first 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 modifications, as in music, across the life arc.

Except that we dont have the sheet music to this new symphony. Wetodays boomers and seniorsare 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, Ive found it helpful to view the symphony of my own life in three acts, or three major developmental stages: Act I, the first three decades; Act II, the middle three decades; and Act III, the final 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.

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 infirmity.

The other, a staircase, shows our potential for upward progression toward wisdom, spiritual growth, learningtoward, 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 archage as physical declinemore than on the stairwayage as potential for continued development and ascent. But it is the stairway that points to late lifes promise, even in the face of physical decline. Perhaps it should be a spiral staircase! Because the wisdom, balance, reflection, and compassion that this upward movement represents dont just come to us in one linear ascension; they circle around us, beckoning us to keep climbing, to keep looking both back and ahead.