I’m not a podcast listener, preferring quiet when going about my day, doing chores, walking or driving somewhere. My sarcastic older brother, a podcast host himself — about squash, the sport, not the vegetable — would say I prefer the voices in my head to voices in my ear and he’s not far off.
So when a friend mentioned a podcast she was enjoying, I nodded and promptly forgot about it. She brought it up again, specifically one episode that was helpful in reframing these age-old questions: How old are you and how old do you feel? I just had had a birthday bringing me to the cusp of a new decade, so this topic caught my attention and I decided to check out the podcast.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, of “Veep” and “Seinfeld” fame, hosts one weekly called “Wiser than me.” The approach basically is that Dreyfus interviews women who are older than her, and thus presumably wiser. The women Dreyfus hosts, no surprise, are famous — actresses, authors etc. And the episode which caught my friend’s attention was an interview with fashion icon and entrepreneur Gloria Von Furstenberg. Typically, Dreyfus starts the interviews by asking the guest’s age, as well as how old they actually feel.
Von Furstenberg was nonplussed by a question once considered rude and offered, “Oh, yes, I’m 76. But I really, really should be 300 … I’ve had a very full life. I’ve done a lot of things… I feel like there’s no way I can make myself even a day younger. Because I feel like I have lived very much every moment.”
Well, some days I feel 300, too, what’s so wise about that? Ah, Von Furstenberg is just getting started. She rejects the phrasing of Louis-Dreyfus’ question, turning it on its head. “[I] would change the word aging and say living.”
She continues, “Age is life. Yes. So instead of saying, How old are you? People should say, how long have you lived?”
In my head, I answer, 59 years.
“And automatically it changes everything,” she says. “Even to a child. How long have you lived, young boy? I have lived 11 years. Wow. That’s impressive. Yeah. And then if you ask an older person, I have lived 76 years. Wow. You know, so aging for me is life. It is not a decay. It’s a continuation of life.”
The designer went on to admit something I have always known about myself. She always wanted to be older than she was. “From a young age. I never wanted to be a little girl. I always wanted to be a woman,” she said.
When I turned 16, I remember uncharacteristically complaining out loud to my mother. I wanted to be 20, then 30, then 40.
Why? For me, I think it had to do with control, the older I was, the more I thought I could control my own destiny. Ha ha — talk about lacking wisdom.
This is von Furstenberg on the one thing she believes you can control:
“Never be a victim no matter what happens. And that’s how you build your character. Because the only thing that you have complete control of, the only thing is your character. You could lose your health. You could lose your wealth. You could lose your job, you could lose your husband, you could lose your family. You could lose everything, but you never lose your character. And that character is the little house inside yourself. That is called strength.”
Before returning to my glorious, ever-quiet, non-podcast world, I clicked on one more “Wiser than me” episode. It happened to be the first one Louis-Dreyfus had recorded and the guest was 85-year-old Jane Fonda.
Fonda related this story: “I was married to Ted Turner, I was on a ranch in New Mexico. And I realized that I’m about to be 59. And holy shit. In a year, I’m going to be 60. And for some reason, for me, figuring I’m probably not going to live past 90, next year is the beginning of my last act, first 30 years, second, 30 years, last 30 years. And you know how important third acts are, they can make sense out of the first two, right? They’re very important. It’s kind of a legacy that you’re going to leave behind.”
Uh-oh. By Fonda’s reckoning, I am soon entering my third act. What does she suggest I do to prepare?
“I spent the year between 59 and 60, researching myself, very objectively, like, it wasn’t really me, it was somebody else,” Fonda says. “So anybody that’s approaching 60, think about doing what I discovered later [is] a thing called a life review.”
Her conclusion at the end of her “review”: “You know, a lot of who we are and how we behave… is because of how we were parented, or not parented. And we always … assume that whatever happened, it was our fault. And what I discovered and what people do discover when they do a life review was — guess what? It had nothing to do with you.”
Yes, there surely is some deep wisdom in that, but do I really want to spend my 59th year doing a life review? My plan was to spend the year planning a trip of a lifetime to kick off my sixth decade. Which is wiser? You tell me.
Returning to the first interview I listened to, here is some final, unquestionable wisdom on the fashion choices of those of us in or near our last 30 years. “I would say everybody needs a black turtleneck,” von Furstenberg counsels.
Amen! Ready or not, third act, here I come.
A member of the Marblehead Current’s Board of Directors, Virginia Buckingham is the former chief executive officer of the Massachusetts Port Authority, chief of staff to two Massachusetts governors, deputy editorial page editor for the Boston Herald and author of “On My Watch: A Memoir.”
Virginia Buckingham
Virginia Buckingham is a former president of the Marblehead Current board of directors, a frequent commentator on WCVB’s On the Record and author of “On My Watch A Memoir.” She is working on a second memoir, “As This Mountain” in her newly empty nest and writes a biweekly column for the Current.
