Prime Time by Jane Fonda Read Free Book Online Page B

to avoid risks, determine appropriate behavior, decide on priorities, and understand the consequences of your actions is still under construction!
    “The skills you practice as a child and pre-teen become much sharper in the teenage years; and those practiced reluctantly, if at all, will diminish on your brain’s hard-disk drive,” writes Judith Newman, an author and columnist. 2 In other words, when it comes to brain neurons, early on we need to use them or lose them!
    Education
    This aspect of neural development is the likely reason that education is one of the key ingredients of Act I, an ingredient we need to have gathered when our brain circuitry is being established. Early education is particularly critical in determining cognitive function in old age—at least in Western cultures.
    Many important studies show that lifelong learning is one element found in happy, healthy older people. It has even been shown that for every added year of education you receive, your life is likely to last more than a year longer! In her book A Long Bright Future, Dr. Laura Carstensen, the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, says, “Although income level and occupational status are influential, when push comes to shove, I think most social scientists would put their money on education as the most important factor in ensuring longer lives.” 3 Dr. Carstensen goes on to explain that educated people have better jobs, earn more money, live in safer neighborhoods, lead healthier lives with less stress, and manage their health care better when they do get sick. It may be too late to do much about your education in the developmental sense, but other studies show that learning new things at any age affects one’s brain synapses and has a positive health impact. We can try to keep learning, and we can ensure that younger people—our grandchildren, perhaps—receive a good education. Do you think you might want to go back and study some more? Lots of people of all ages are doing so these days, and schools are making it more convenient for us.
    Gender Identity
    Another central factor in Act I involves how we have internalized our gender identity—what goes into being a girl or a boy. This is more culturally determined than we realize. As the spiritual leader and philosopher Krishnamurti once said, “You think you are thinking your thoughts, you are not; you are thinking the culture’s thoughts.” When it comes to gender distinctions, early on the culture’s thoughts profoundly determine who we become. Starting in Act I, boys and girls internalize messages about gender and society’s expectations. If we do not become conscious of these unspoken communications and thus do not address them, they continue to determine our thoughts and behaviors throughout our whole lives, in ways that can rob us of our full humanity. One’s gender identity may be a key aspect of Act I, the area where we can sustain the deepest wounds during this stage of gathering.

    Me, third in line, at my high school graduation. I designed the dresses we all wore.
GIRLS
    When you do a life review, think about your adolescence. What was it like, in gender terms? What scenes do you remember? What were you like? What was your mother like? Your aunts? What role models did you have? How did your father and mother respond to your changes and development during puberty?
    Doing my life review, I realized the extent to which I changed when I entered adolescence. For me it began to happen around age twelve, when boys entered the picture and my father began to insinuate that I was fat. Prior to that, I had been a tomboy and what had mattered to me about my body was that I was strong and limber and brave enough to climb high trees and wrestle with my boy friends. Once it was expected that the boy friends would become boyfriends, the emphasis shifted to fitting in, being popular, looking right, staying thin. This is when I became disembodied—I can feel it now, in