Live Long and . . .

by William Shatner

  Like every young actor, I struggled. I blundered on and wandered from one job to the next, sometimes half-starving, sometimes not going to the laundry, often not going to the movies, but I was very proud of the fact that I always paid my rent, I never stood in line for an unemployment check (to which I was often entitled), and I never asked anyone for anything.

  My goal, my dream, was to have $1,800 in the bank. I don’t know where that number came from, but it represented success. If only I could save $1,800! Eventually I did; I could look at my bankbook and see it: $1,800! I was living in New York, I was married and had children, but I was never able to save more than that. Our car would break, something would happen to a pipe, and our savings would go down to $1,000.

  I lived with an element of fear all the time. How am I going to pay the rent and feed my family? Star Trek enabled me to get ahead for the first time. I was rich; I had $2,100 in the bank! And then my wife decided to divorce me. There went my $2,100—and a lot more. That divorce cost me everything. When Star Trek was canceled, I was Captain Kirk, I was a legitimate TV star, and I couldn’t cash a $15 check. I used my last few dollars to put new tires on my truck and put a camper in the rear bed, so I could get from summer theater to summer theater and have a place to live. That fear of being broke never went away. I’ve lived with it the rest of my life.

  There are many people who believe that money plays a much too important role in people’s lives. Mostly, I’ve found, the people who believe that have enough money so that they don’t have to worry about it. But I have learned a few things about money: First, the obvious, it is better to have money than not have it. Money makes life easier, although conversely the pursuit of money often makes life more difficult. Second, live within your means; and third, try to stay out of debt.

  And fourth, many people too easily equate money and happiness. I have known a lot of wealthy people, and while some of them were quite happy, many others were not. They had made their fortune believing money was the key to their happiness and discovered when they got it that they were no happier than they had been earlier in their life. So their quest to make even more money continued, with them believing more money might make them happy. In some instances, it will. Conversely, I have known many people who have struggled or are securely ensconced in the middle class who are very happy. They have built a life for themselves within the bounds of their earnings capacity that brings them joy.

  Money is neutral. It has been said that the only thing money can’t buy you is poverty. But it doesn’t buy happiness either. It simply can make happiness possible.

  I have always been careful with money. I inherited my economic philosophy from my father: Buy wooden coffins. My strategy was simple: Keep that monthly nut as low as possible. I would buy things I needed with the money that I had managed to save. That way I would own those things without having to make payments. For that reason I never leased a car or took a loan to buy a car; I bought a car I could afford at the time, often a used car. When I bought a home, I paid for it without taking a mortgage; that way I wouldn’t have to worry about how to make the monthly payments.

  More than anything I own, that house represents my security. I have lived there for more than four decades; I have experienced the best and the very worst of life in that house. And there has never been a moment when I thought about moving.

  I’m no different from anybody else. I like shiny objects. I like men’s toys. But things make almost no difference in my life. I can now afford to drive wonderful cars and I do, and I enjoy it, but I would do fine without those cars. I own horses and I love them, but if I didn’t own horses I’d be at a riding stable renting a horse by the hour. I am not an ostentatious person. Long ago I realized that the things that really matter in my life aren’t dependent on money: My wife, Liz, and my daughters and their families. My dogs. Riding horses. Having people whose company I enjoy over to the house to watch Monday Night Football. Discovering new hole-in-the-wall restaurants. The luxury to be creative and continue acting and writing and producing. The opportunity to travel and have adventures. My health, obviously. And my house.

  The place with the light in the window. When I finally began working regularly on television I bought a house in Beverly Hills. It wasn’t for me; it was a place for my kids to live with their mother. It wasn’t in the finest part of Beverly Hills, but it allowed them to go to the Beverly Hills schools, which are wonderful.

  I was living in a small cottage in Studio City. Every day I would run a three-quarter-mile loop through the hills, and when I did I would see this lovely house on top of a hill. And I would dream that one day I would be successful enough to own that house. One day I finally walked up that driveway and asked, “Is this house for sale?”

  “You know,” the owner said, “it’s the damnedest thing. I just put it up for sale.”

  I raced down to the Realtor’s office and got in line. I was able to buy the house for $100,000. I have lived in that house ever since.

  The house has changed as I have. I have rebuilt it almost completely three different times. My neighbors have moved in; their families grew up and then moved out. I stayed. It might have been less expensive to move, but that was never a consideration for me. It is familiar to me. It is comfortable. This has been the house with the light in the window. You can look out from this house and see the sunrise and the sunset. It was the house in which Nerine died, after which we did an Indian ceremony so her spirit might rest. I buried two dogs under our fruit trees. That house is my adult history. Why would I want to be anywhere else? Because a new house has bigger bedrooms?

  The memory of my early struggles still dominates my life. I know I am financially secure; I just don’t feel that way. My feelings about money, I have learned, aren’t necessarily rational. Which, ironically, probably puts me in the majority. The fear of being in debt has plagued me my entire adult life and I expect at this point it will never go away. To me, it’s like having an emotional junk drawer, a place in which you just throw all the odds and ends and in the back of your mind you know that someday, when you get a little extra time, you’re going to clean it out. Well, I have come to accept the fact that I am going to die with my junk drawer in disarray. Other people are going to have to go through it and wonder, What the heck is this and why did Bill save it? But I have also come to accept I am never going to be free of my fear of financial failure. Instead, I have learned to live with it.

  I still don’t spend a lot of money on myself. I am completely comfortable with my life. I don’t need bigger and better and brighter to change my life. I don’t want to change my life. I am encouraged all the time by everybody to spend more money on myself. “Have a good time,” they say. And in response I tell them that I am having the greatest time. I am doing the things that make me happy with the people who make me happy.

  When I was considerably younger, like many people, I wondered what I would be doing differently with my life if I suddenly had financial security. The answer, I told myself, was pretty much “nothing.” I loved what I was doing and couldn’t imagine I would be happier doing something else. And then, as the years passed, I earned that financial security. I could afford to do pretty much anything I wanted to do, or even do nothing. It turned out I was right; I simply continued doing exactly the same things I had always been doing. Although admittedly I did so in a better car. And I slept better at night.

  It is said you can’t buy health, but money can at least help maintain good health. Good health is not an accident. It is a subject you can educate yourself about. The knowledge is there for you. I have had good fortune: I didn’t step on an exposed electrical wire. I avoided being hit by a car. And I had the good sense to be born to parents with good genes. I have been given the gift of good health by my parents and their parents. I have my own philosophy about that. Throughout history the Jews have been an oppressed people. In ancient history they were slaves. The Jews who survived had to be smart and physically fit. And they handed those t
raits down genetically through the ages. Now, I don’t know if that is actually true or not, but it makes sense to me.

  But that gift of good health has made everything else possible: Without it, life can be a struggle. Just getting out of bed can be the greatest effort of your day. You have no room for love or anything else; you simply live in survival mode.

  Having access to good doctors and medical care obviously is important, but it isn’t enough. Good health is the result of what you do every day, as well as your luck in the gene pool. For a long time I have paid attention to what medical science told me were the best ways to maintain good health. I read the books and magazines and incorporated that information into my daily life. And when they announced that everything they had been recommending was wrong and changed it completely, I continued to follow their advice.

  In addition to genetic engineering, I have learned that maintaining good health also requires you to be aware of the importance of diet, exercise, and, by association, your mental attitude. When someone tells me they are coming down with a cold, I always tell them that I don’t get colds, I don’t get sick. If I do get sick I forget about it quickly; the way I describe it is that I don’t get sick until I am reminded that I am sick.

  I believe that the foundation of good health is your mind-body connection. We do know that people who think they heal faster do heal faster. It is vitally important to tap into that and unleash the power of the mind to protect and heal your body.

  Complicating the problem of knowing what’s good for you is the reality that achieving and maintaining good health has substantial value, in particular to people selling that vast universe of products that supposedly keep us healthy. The general rule I tend to follow is that if it sounds too good to be true then it probably isn’t true. Vitamins and supplements, for example, are a multibillion-dollar market. But the reality is that there is very little compelling evidence that most of these products have any real value. Except to those people selling them. Most people get all the vitamins they need from their diet. The exception seems to be vitamin D, which isn’t actually a vitamin but rather is a hormone. Nobody really knows what it does, but there seems to be some evidence that a deficiency of vitamin D is associated with several serious diseases and conditions. Most people who live in the West or the South get sufficient vitamin D from sunlight, but those people living north of the Mason-Dixon Line, especially in the Northwest and Midwest, can’t get enough of it naturally much of the year and should be taking a supplement. But as for other vitamins and supplements I have always believed that if it makes you feel better to take them, then it is worth the cost.

  I have never been pillaged by false claims. I am skeptical enough that I have never been taken in by someone who is going to make me rich overnight or healthy. But I probably barely avoided it. My active curiosity has led me to seek out information. I have some knowledge of Chinese pharmacology and India’s Ayurvedic medicine and I subscribe to trying them. I do try things; when I read that beets will lower your blood pressure within twenty minutes after eating them, I ate some beets. Why not? As far as I know, no one has died of an overdose of beets! I understand it all might be snake oil, we certainly are offered enough of it, but my curiosity compels me to at least try these things.

  The truth is we all want to know what’s good for us. Every few years some fad diet or exercise craze comes along that supposedly makes a difference. Now we are in the midst of the organic revolution. Organic foods are supposed to be very healthy for us. Maybe they are. But there is little real science to support that.

  When I was growing up we knew nothing about healthy living. My father strived for one thing, to keep his family whole and well: At that time that meant meat on the table at night and cake or some other sweets for dessert. We didn’t know that sugar could be bad for you. We knew nothing about the benefits of eating vegetables and fruits. We weren’t even aware that smoking was killing us. We had no idea how to take care of ourselves. I remember sitting in a movie theater watching the incredibly dashing Paul Henreid put two cigarettes in his mouth, light them both, then take one out and hand it to his glamorous lady and they both puffed contently. Smoking was considered romantic and loving. Who knew?

  And gradually health was transformed from a desire to an industry. The government began telling us what was good and bad for us. They created the food pyramid, illustrating what we should be eating. I paid attention to all of it. Several years ago I was on my way to dinner with Dr. Mehmet Oz and a cardiologist friend of his. On the way to the restaurant I read an article in the New York Times announcing that the food pyramid was wrong; instead of eating a lot of carbs and little meat and fat, we should be eating more meat and fat and fewer carbs.

  At dinner I asked them how they could explain this complete reversal. I said there must have been evidence in their journals that justified this announcement. They sat there with a shamed look on their faces, like teenage boys caught making out with the neighbor’s daughter. In fact, they had no explanation. They had been fed the same knowledge that we got.

  So what we believe we know is evolving. But there are several things that we know for certain that make a difference. These things are settled; they are not going to change. The first thing I did for my health was stop smoking. I smoked: I wanted to be as sophisticated as Paul Henreid; I wanted to light two cigarettes and casually hand one of them to Bette Davis, who would puff on it enticingly until the moment of romance struck!

  And then the surgeon general issued a report in 1964 stating flatly that smoking was deadly. That certainly was a strong way to spoil the romance. I stopped smoking about three years later: We were shooting Star Trek and four of us were in a limo on the way to a promotional appearance. We started talking about the surgeon general’s report and each of us in turn said why we were willing to give up smoking. One person said he would do it to prove he had the discipline. When my turn came, I said I would do it because my daughters were refusing to kiss me, making faces, and telling me I smelled like cigarettes. We opened a window and in unison threw out our packs. (Littering wasn’t such a big deal then either.) I never smoked another cigarette. I was fortunate; for whatever reason it was not an especially difficult thing for me to do once I’d made the commitment.

  Unfortunately, Leonard Nimoy could not stop and eventually it did kill him. After he was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a lung disease caused by smoking, he asked me several times, “Bill, why didn’t you make me give up smoking?” No one can “make” another person give up an addiction. All we can do is cite facts: Smoking kills. There is no doubt about that. But it also causes several other chronic diseases that make life more difficult. So at the top of the list of things to do for your health is stopping smoking.

  Next is exercise. Smoking will shorten your life; exercise will lengthen it. I have always been active and I remain so. While I’ve never spent too much time in gyms, I have always found ways of exercising. I am fortunate enough to have a heated pool and I run in it; many people swim, but I can only swim ten or so laps, so instead I run like hell in the water for about thirty minutes. I try to do it pretty much every day when I’m home. It is difficult, but if the great flood ever comes I will be able to run through it!

  But I do substantially more than that. I am eighty-seven and I’m still lifting two twenty-five-pound weights several times a day. I used to run; now I walk as much as I can—which isn’t much, due to my surgery. But my greatest exercise is riding. Anyone who believes riding a horse is not exercise has never ridden a horse. It requires movement, muscle strength, and endurance. If you are not in decent condition riding will wear you out, tax your muscles, and result in considerable discomfort. When I’m in L.A. I ride as often as I can. I’ll ride several times a week if possible.

  As for my diet, I have been given the gift of Elizabeth Shatner, who has taken a real interest in healthy eating. I am an experienced eater; I have been doing it successfully for more than eight decades. But I
have tried to change my diet, even knowing how flimsy the real data is. I don’t officially refer to myself as a vegetarian, but I don’t eat nearly as much meat as I once did. I’m not sure it makes any difference, but it makes me feel good, so I do it. I also have learned to stay away from bread because the carbs in bread turn immediately to sugar, which can be a cause of diabetes. Elizabeth and I are not picky eaters; we’re careful eaters. She does the best she can for us with salads and vegetables and non-bread grains. Years ago, if I had been told I would be extolling the taste of crispy beets, I probably would have doubted you. But Liz slices them, puts them in a pan with olive oil, and heats them until they are crisp. They are delicious, and you can put anything on them.

  Is that healthy? I believe it is; therefore it is. Nothing is more important to maintaining good health than your mental attitude. Some people believe meditation makes a significant difference in their health; if they believe it, it does. We think we know so much, but we know so little. We don’t have the slightest real knowledge how important a positive mental outlook is to maintaining good health. We do have some evidence that laughter actually makes a difference in the state of your health, and we know that placebos can be effective, sometimes even more effective than the drugs they are being tested against. There is no scientific reason that should be true, except that the person being given the placebo believes it will help.

  I know people who only get sick when they have finished their projects. They are able to keep the demons away while they have work that has to be done. But when they allow themselves to relax, they give themselves permission to be sick.

  I never talk about how I’m feeling. I listen to other people talk about their physical problems, and I hear them trying to top each other: “I’ve got to have my knee replaced.” Okay, I’ll meet your knee and raise you a hip. Nobody wants to hear about another person’s problems. If someone asks me how I’m feeling my answer is always the same: “Terrific.” “I feel so good there could be two of me.” I say that no matter how I am feeling. I am of the opinion that you can seduce yourself into thinking you are healthier than you are. If you get a cold and are not contagious, staying in bed isn’t helpful. All you can do is lie there moaning about how bad you are feeling. If you can get up, get up, go outside, move around. I’m not talking about a serious disease; that’s a whole different situation. But for many minor problems I believe you can talk yourself into feeling better than you actually do.