“I know it sounds weird,” Kate told a Redbook magazine reporter (April 1991), “but that’s exactly what happened. I believe your body talks to you, and you have to listen to it!”
Kate went to a clinic and had a mammogram. Sure enough, there was a malignant growth in her left breast. The growth was removed by surgery in 1987. The series of events caused Kate to reevaluate her life. She began to try to get more sleep and to work less, but the demands of a hit TV show continued to pull at her. Soon, she was back into the same ultrastressful lifestyle she had been in prior to the surgery. Then in September 1989, the cancer appeared again in her left breast. To correct it, Kate had to undergo a partial mastectomy and reconstructive plastic surgery.
“I was scared,” she said of that time. “I was petrified. I thought, Why me? I was angry.”
It took the second bout with cancer to convince Kate Jackson that ignoring her emotional and physical symptoms had been a bad decision. She set about immediately to correct matters. She sold her posh California home and moved to a serene 125-acre farm in Virginia. She began a daily program of physical exercise. She changed her diet to fruits, grains, fish, and cereal—no fats, no junk food, no cigarettes. She also started getting plenty of sleep at night.
“I don’t want the anxiety I used to live with,” said Kate. “That’s why I moved to Virginia. I don’t want the stress. I don’t need all that.”
We all can’t afford to care for ourselves the way Kate Jackson did, but we can afford to learn her lesson. The next time you are tempted to view your emotional (or physical) pain as bad, you might think about seeing it as your mind’s way of telling you that it wants to keep you healthy. It’s warning you that something inside you is working against that. To think otherwise is to miss the signal.
Don’t ignore your smoke alarm going off!
Growthwork
I want you to use the truth you learned in this chapter to initiate a new self-examination exercise. The procedure is simple to follow, yet its results can be profound.
I want you to find a time and place when you can be alone with your journal. Across the top of the paper, I want you to write “Emotional Pain Is Good.” Then make two columns. At the top of the left-hand column, write “Emotionally Painful Event.” At the top of the right-hand column, write “What My Pain Was Telling Me.”
Now, think about situations from your life that were/are emotionally painful (past or present). Put them in the left-hand column. For each situation, write in the right-hand column what the emotional pain was trying to say to you. Let me give you some examples from my life to get you started:
Emotional Pain Is Good
Emotionally Painful Event What My Pain Was Telling Me
1. Felt very lonely while working at the University of Tennessee for a year as the head resident of a dorm. 1. “It is not good that man should be alone.” I was “alone” as far as having close male friends and also did not have a girlfriend for companionship. Not having close, intimate relationships shows itself in the emotion of feeling lonely.
2. Felt anxious about moving my family to Austin after living comfortably in Dallas for six years. 2. Lots of uncertainty about making a good enough income in my new job and deciding on purchasing a new My anxiety was trying to home. tell me I was feeling threatened about the possibility that the move would not turn out well and that I had unnecessarily put my family in a bad situation.
3. Felt very sad over the death of my mom. She passed away suddenly at age fifty-seven. 3. I was close to Mom, and her death left a relation-suddenly ship “void” in my life. When we experience a loss of any kind, we often feel sad and blue as a result.
4. Felt angry when someone rode my bumper and “flipped me off” before he sped away. 4. People acting that way is disrespectful. Anger can be a sign that disrespect of some kind has been shown to us. In this case, my anger was trying to tell me that I don 't like to be treated rudely (who does?).
These examples from my life should give you a better understanding of what I want you to do. The main purpose of this assignment is to help you start paying attention to painful emotions as signals that something important has just taken place in your life rather than see them as unpleasant irritations. Use this assignment to think through previous situations that were painful for you, and try to figure out the “message” of the emotional pain.
A second assignment is to look at your life right now from this perspective. What painful emotions have you been feeling, and what are they trying to signal you about? Take time to think through whether or not you are currently depressed, angry, hurt, or anxious, and see if you can’t link these emotions to what the internal issue might be.
The bottom line is this: I want you to begin to appreciate, even be thankful for, the fact that when you have trouble in your soul, emotional pain will let you know. It will alert you to it and motivate you to figure out what the problem is and solve it.
Emotional pain is good! Believe it!
17
YOU ARE GOING TO DIE
Pale death with impartial tread beats at the poor man’s
cottage door and at the palaces of kings.
—Horace
Few truths have the potential to affect our lives as strongly as the one that warns, “You are going to die.” Death waits around the corner for us all. As Dr. Irvin Yalom expressed in his book Existential Psychotherapy, “The most obvious, the most easily apprehended ultimate concern is death. We exist now, but one day shall cease to be. Death will come, and there is no escape from it. It is a terrible truth, and we respond to it with mortal terror.”1
Death may be “a terrible truth,” but it is a truth that can prompt us to live life more fully if we allow it to. I’m not trying to use positive thinking on you here and make you view death as a categorically great and wonderful thing. However, I do hope to strongly impress upon you that seeing death for what it is can beneficially change your way of living.
Death is the ultimate limitation placed on life. Dr. Dennis Hensley explained in his book How to Manage Your Time how mankind has sought for centuries, in a variety of ways, to extend the time we have on earth; yet death always wins and in an amazingly predictable way:
We are all destined for a guaranteed termination. No one has ever beaten the system. In fact, the Bible even tells us about how long we have before our termination: three score and ten (Psalm 90:10). It’s interesting to note that even though that calculation was recorded three millennia ago, it hasn’t changed. After thirty centuries of medical, educational, social and scientific advances, research conducted annually by insurance companies reveals that the average person lives to be from seventy to seventy-five years old (three score and ten). Every moment of life is valuable. Once time is gone, it’s gone forever. You can’t buy it back, borrow it back, bribe it back, or even pray it back. A wasted moment is irretrievable.2
We are headed toward a “guaranteed termination” whether we like it or not, an end point past which our time here on earth will be over. The limitation death places on our lives makes our time precious. If we will let it, the fact that our time on earth is finite can be used to motivate us to lead quality lives. Because of the reality of death, we are pushed to see life as something valuable and, thus, to live accordingly.
Now, before you get too self-assured that you are already time-conscious and leading a quality-filled life, let me share some statistics with you. If you get eight hours of sleep a night, you will spend approximately 122 days a year sleeping. If you spend one hour each for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, you will spend 46 days a year in these activities alone. Sleeping and eating combined cost you half of each year you are alive. Add to that all the time spent in personal grooming, traveling to and from work, bill paying, shopping, and taking care of other life maintenance requirements, and you can see how much time “slips away” virtually undetected.
With what little time we have left for making life meaningful, too many of us find ourselves going th
rough the motions and achieving very little of lasting value. We live as if we have all the time in the world, when the truth of the matter is that our time on earth is short. We truly are “here today, gone tomorrow,” making every second precious.
I once heard a story of a man who was driving by an apple orchard when he happened to see a farmer lifting his pigs, one at a time, up to the tree branches so that the pigs could eat the apples. The man stopped his car, got out, and approached the farmer. “Excuse me,” he said, “but isn’t that an awfully time-consuming practice?” The farmer looked at the man, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “So what? What’s time to a pig?” I sometimes wonder if a lot of people are just as blind as the farmer when it comes to recognizing areas in their lives where they are squandering time.
Having the Time of Your Life
The fact that placing a time limitation on something often makes it more valuable came through loud and clear to me during a vacation. My wife, Holly, and I took a trip to Jamaica prior to the birth of Kelly, our third child. (It was one of those “we’d better go have some fun now while we still can” kind of vacations.) While there, I decided to rent a jet ski, which was something I had never done. The hotel charged thirty dollars per half hour of riding time. That struck me as pretty expensive, but I paid it anyway.
Given the time limitation of just thirty minutes hanging over my head, I got as much enjoyment out of that ride as I could. I went 347 miles an hour on that jet ski (okay, I am exaggerating a bit), sprayed tourists on the beach with my wake, knocked other jet skiers off their jet skis, and even purposely fell off a few dozen times just to increase the excitement. I was determined to make sure I got my money’s worth.
Yet throughout the ride I kept an eye on my watch, knowing that my time would be up relatively soon. I knew the rental guys would start to wave me in to the beach as soon as my thirty minutes were over. This time constraint motivated me to try to squeeze every second of enjoyment possible from that ride.
Suppose when I registered at the hotel, I had been told that I was the one millionth customer to have booked a reservation, and as a prize for this, I was going to be given unlimited time on a jet ski during all the days I was in Jamaica. Do you think I would have found it as meaningful to ride a jet ski under those circumstances? Would having use of the jet ski with no time limitations have made riding more valuable? No, not hardly. If the hotel had let me ride a jet ski whenever I wanted to, as long as I wanted to, I would not have enjoyed or valued it as much.
I’m convinced the same reality applies to life. You have a limited amount of time to live. Someday, and you don’t know when, your time will be up, and you will be “waved to the beach.” Your ride is over. If you understand that, even appreciate it, you will live life with vigor, with passion. You won’t waste a second of the time you have here.
Think about the alternative for a moment. Can you imagine how you would live your life if you were going to live here on earth forever? Let’s say that you woke up tomorrow knowing that you would spend eternity as a human being here on earth. How would you live? Would that trigger excitement and enthusiasm for life in you? Most of us, I think, would be pretty lethargic about the whole thing. Shoot, most of us are already lethargic about living life when all we have is seventy years!
Those of us who truly recognize and respect that life has a time limit will make an effort to get the best “ride” we can. We will do everything possible to experience life fully and will appreciate all the wonderful things about life that are available to us while we are here. If seeing death for what it really is can motivate us to make maximum use of our time while we are here, it is a very positive thing that we are going to die.
Why Do We Live Such Boring Lives?
All right then, we will accept death as an important motivator for living life well. But that raises a serious question: Why aren’t people more motivated to have a fuller life given that they know their days are numbered? More specifically, why do so many people mope along at a mediocre, unexciting pace or fill their lives with meaningless activities when they know that their time is running out? Hey, let’s face it. Life is not a dress rehearsal—this is the real thing. Lights, camera, action! You’re on, friend! This is your life. You have the starring role. It’s either an Oscar or obscurity. The choice is yours.
So why isn’t everybody shooting for an Oscar? I’m sure there are numerous reasons, but one reason may be that people are so terrified by death that they will do anything to avoid facing it. Like children who put their hands over their ears and say over and over, “I’m not listening, I’m not listening, I’m not listening,” some of us put our hands over our eyes and say, “I’m not going to face death, I’m not going to face death, I’m not going to face death.” The more terrified we are by the reality of death, the more we will stay focused on “doing things” so that we don’t have to think about it.
Woody Allen once remarked, “I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Too many of us feel that same way. But death awaits us all. As I’ve said, rather than face the reality of death, many of us numb ourselves to it in one way or another. Some of us try to ignore it through busyness; others try to run from it via instant gratification. Some try to postpone it; others try to outsmart it. Nothing works, however. Death always comes.
For a long time my version of avoiding the reality of death (and trying to improve a shaky sense of self-esteem) was to be a workaholic. I guess I thought that death wouldn’t have a way to invade my conscious thoughts if I just kept myself constantly busy. So, constantly busy I stayed. You may have done something similar, or you may have used some other way of running from this “terrible truth.” I can tell you this, however: your way of running is no more successful than mine was. Death still waits. Refusing to face it as something real often results in a less-than-fulfilling life.
When Death Becomes Real
Sometimes it takes a major wake-up call like almost losing your life or loved ones losing theirs to realize how precious life is. How many times have you heard about a person who came close to death and used that experience as a springboard to a more purposeful and enjoyable life? A man may almost be killed in an airplane crash and, by facing death so squarely, come to appreciate and savor life more fully. A woman may be told she has a life-threatening cancer but, thanks to a successful operation, survives. Afterward, she quits her job as a salesclerk and becomes a teacher because she finds it more rewarding. A rebellious teenager may be involved in a near fatal car accident, yet walks away; afterward, he has a new sense of the value of life and he becomes more meaningfully involved in high school activities and community service.
It could be that our unwillingness to accept death under normal circumstances makes near-death experiences and even times of personal crisis so potentially life-changing. These moments often provoke us to examine what life is really all about. We see the “big picture” a little more clearly at these times and do some major reevaluations about how we are living.
American author Jack London went through an experience like that. Hoping to make a gold strike and come home a rich man, he traveled to the Yukon. He staked one claim, but it held no gold. When winter came, London was unable to leave because of the heavy snows. He spent four months in a cabin, often by himself, waiting for the spring thaw. He had a lot of time to reflect on his random style of living. He had been an oyster pirate in San Francisco, a seal hunter off the coasts of Japan and Russia, a factory worker, a hobo, a high-school dropout. It began to bother him greatly that he had been busy but had done nothing significant with his life.
That spring Jack London left Canada, came home, finished his high school work, spent a semester at the University of California, then turned all his energies toward becoming a writer. During the next eighteen years, London wrote 190 short stories, 22 novels, 5 plays, 28 poems, and more than 200 newspaper articles. He became the first person in history to earn more than a million dollars strictly fro
m writing.
When asked to summarize what motivated him to his huge success as a writer, Jack London said that while he was trapped in the Yukon, he developed a credo that he swore would guide him for the rest of his life. His credo was as follows: “I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not just exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.” Jack London knew the reality of death, so he used each day to its fullest.
Pretty amazing, isn’t it? Jack London went from being a high school dropout with no money to becoming the most successful author the world had known to that time because he was forced to acknowledge that his days on earth were limited and that he had been wasting them. And he did it all in just eighteen years. That’s not a bad trade-off: four lonely months of snowbound “death” stuck in a cabin in exchange for eighteen years of unbridled success.
Your Personal Awakening
A motion picture starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams called Awakenings tells the story of a physician who uses a drug to bring people out of a physical disorder referred to as “sleeping sickness.” De Niro plays the part of a man who went into a comalike sleep when he was in his twenties and is brought back to consciousness in his late forties. When De Niro fully realizes what has happened to his life, he frantically seeks to make up for lost time. He reads books, goes dancing, plays sports, and even finds a girlfriend.
People who have seen the movie may experience conflicting emotions: on the one hand, they are delighted that this man is well again and so excited about life; on the other hand, they surely have to be uneasy about the fact that their own lives are just as far behind in truly being lived as his—only they haven’t been in a coma!
The Lies We Believe Page 25