Prime Time by Jane Fonda Read Free Book Online Page A

experiences, cognitive therapy, or mediation, no matter how old we are, a neural-pathway shift can occur; the signals can change direction. If we can manage to maintain the new, positive interpretation of the person or event, this new pathway will win out over the formerly hardwired memory. We may not be able to change what happened, but we can change our feelings about it. This is humankind’s ultimate freedom!
    The possibility of treading new neural pathways through the landscape of the past is in itself a worthwhile endeavor as a way to grow, to develop your character, to become whole. What a potentially precious gift doing a life review can be, for ourselves! And, perhaps, for our relatives and children (should we choose to write it down and show it to them): not writing a history for the purpose of impressing or pleasing or reassuring, but to tell our own real story. Our truth may help set our children free. And it will surely help us shape a strong Third Act, one built on a foundation of truth—about who we are and have, actually, always been.

CHAPTER 3
    Act I: A Time for Gathering
      We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
—T. S. ELIOT, Four Quartets

    I must have been about eight years old here.
    T HE FIRST ACT OF OUR LIVES, AS I SEE IT, BEGINS AT BIRTH AND lasts for twenty-nine years. Originally, I called the First Act “Gathering” because it is the stage when we gather together the ingredients—the tools, the skills, the scars—that make us uniquely us, the elements we will spend Acts II and III recovering from but also building on. In terms of the passage above from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Act I is the “place” we come back to after all our exploring, and, because we are laden with experience and perhaps forgiveness and wisdom, we see it and understand it for the first time. This is why it is important, in a life review, to visualize and reflect on who we were back then and what that can teach us about who we are now and what we want to focus on going forward. Often, by doing so, we can make our present life better.
    Unhappy Childhoods Can Fade Away
    Interestingly, I discovered research that indicates that whether our childhoods were happy or miserable is not all that important in later life. Dr. George Vaillant, a psychiatrist and researcher, is the director of the thirty-year-long Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the most important studies ever done about aging and why people either thrive or fail to. In his book about the study, Aging Well, Dr. Vaillant, talking about the men in the study (although women were also participants), says, “Unhappy childhoods become less important with time. When the lives of the men whose childhoods were most bleak … were contrasted with men whose childhoods were the most sunny … the influence on college adjustment was very important. By early midlife, childhood was still significantly important, but by old age the warmth of childhood was statistically unimportant. A warm childhood, like a rich father, tended to inoculate the men against future pain, but a bleak childhood—such as with a poverty-stricken father—did not condemn either the Harvard or the Inner City men to misery.” 1
    The Young Brain
    One thing scientists know for sure: at birth, babies’ brains have around twenty-five hundred synapses, or points of connection between the neurons that receive and send signals. These continue to multiply during the very early years, and until recently, it was believed that this increase in synapses happened only once—in childhood. Not true! Brain scientists now know that there is a second surge right before adolescence that lasts into the late twenties.
    Think about it: Whether you are a boy or a girl, you have all these high-octane hormones flooding through you, but the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that will allow you