Free Prime Time by Jane Fonda Page B

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