What's a 3rd Act?

December 14, 2009

I've decided I'm going to live a long time.

I already have — I'm 71. But I plan to live a really long time. In fact, I'm unwilling to write down a number goal. I don't want to limit myself.

Nevertheless, I know that human life, so far, is finite. So a 3rd Act is just what it sounds like — the last chapter. My life will end.

As the only animal who lives with the conscious knowledge it's going to die — as far as we know — the human has the unique ability and opportunity to respond to this reality.

Recently I had reason to remember a series of 1960s books by Carlos Castaneda. Castaneda claimed to be passing along the teachings of a Yaqui shaman called don Juan. It was mystical, mysterious stuff, involving eating mushrooms and seeing visions, and including some "separate reality" in your life.

The 'shrooms made Castaneda's writings amazingly popular in the chemical revolution. It may have been all fiction, or nonsense, but it was philosophical. I enjoyed these books a lot in my wide-eyed 20s, and I intend to read them again soon, to see how I've changed.

But, what stayed in my mind from the Castaneda books for fifty years is this: you'll live a different life if you remember that death is following, there, just over your shoulder. I believe I have kept this in mind ever since, though its presence has made me neither morbidly depressed nor stunningly successful.

What Castaneda described as "the headlights in the rear view mirror" has contributed at least a little to the creation of 3rdActs.com. I'm going to try to tell you, in a series of articles, what this site is about.

NOTE 12/18/2009: I've now read a long 2007 Salon.com article: "The Dark Legacy of Carlos Castaneda," and learned much more than I wanted to know about him and the rest of his life — he died in 1998. Here's a link. Castaneda has been unmasked as a plagiarist, a fiction writer, and described as a "hoaxer who never admitted anything." The idea of the "headlights" may have come from someone else, but I feel O.K. being grateful to this imaginative writer for giving it to me when I was young and impressionable.

This is personal, so I'm going to start by writing about the early "acts" of my life.

My first act, after childhood, was as a radio guy. It was a career choice made by a six-year-old. I was going to be a radio star. Of course, by the time I was prepared to work in American radio, in the late 1950s, radio was changing at high speed from a diversified entertainment medium — drama, adventure, soap operas, westerns, comedy shows, live music, news, religion — to a broadcast juke box hosted by disc jockeys. Instead of an announcer-actor, I became a DJ. You pick a role and they rewrite the script.

This continued. I changed with the times and in response to my boredom level — I became a program manager, a time salesman, a sales manager, then a station manager. This took sixteen years.

The second time I got fired as a radio station manager I stayed out. I became an ad agent. But I was still from the creative side, and I developed my abilities as a writer. Advertising was my product. This ate up another twenty years.

I returned to radio for another eight years, as a marketing director for a radio network. I got bored, cranky, and old. End of Act Two.

So, what now? I'm writing away, hoping something develops. The products so far — an unfinished novel, a lot of blog posts, emails, ideas, journals, and bullshit. And, 3rdActs.com.

The point of this manifesto is to tell you about — and maybe seduce you into — a change from the American Way of Retirement and Aging. If you know you can live more than another ten years, in good health, intelligence intact and growing, maybe you'll want to.

And, maybe you'll realize that if you don't name a number limit for your life, you will extend it naturally. The idea is not to just make plans. We have no time for plans at our age, but we have plenty of time to develop and grow. If you get my drift.

There's the nugget.

This article is unfinished. I expect to come back to it while I'm writing the series, rewrite and add on, annotate, footnote, and link it to sources. Think of it as a living, churning thing, like me. Like you, if you'll break out of the American Old Person's Glide Path.

We could waste our precious 3rd Acts blaming some "them" for the mindset we're stuck in, or we could realize that we're the ones who perpetuate it by "retiring" our minds and bodies and watching ourselves die by inches, on pharmaceutical life support.

I shouldn't stop writing this on a minor chord, but there it is.

To be continued…

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AFTERTHOUGHT 12/18/09: Since announcing here, publicly, that I plan to live a really long time, I've realized that this isn't a new idea with me — because, I've been making long-term plans. Making the announcement made me aware of the subconscious resistance I've been feeling to doing that. I've been programmed, like you, to comply with actuarial tables — you can only expect to live as long as the experts say you will. Yet, Jennifer Jones died the other day, at 90, and she was born at a time when the tables expected people to live only about 50 years. Can we live as long as we want to live? Could be. But you have to want to.