Live Long and . . .

by William Shatner

  I’ve tried other drugs, too. For a time cocaine was everywhere in L.A. I’ve tried it about a dozen times believing there must be something to it that I’m missing, and I thought it was awful. It didn’t make me feel good at all; besides, it made my nose run. In fact, not only didn’t it make me feel good, it also was a downer. It really depressed me. I didn’t see any reason to continue trying this stuff that made me feel bad.

  Over my lifetime I have tried several different drugs. Once I was working in London and had a few days off, so Liz and I decided to go to Amsterdam. I had never been to Holland and wanted to see this great city, and I was also intrigued by the availability of drugs there. This was during the winter and there were very few tourists. We were in a coffee shop and we were offered magic mushrooms. Magic mushrooms? How could I say no? Somewhere in the recesses of my mind I remember reading that Alice in Wonderland was actually the description of a psychedelic trip. Well, I always loved Alice in Wonderland, and if it were possible to visit Wonderland that appealed to me.

  So Liz and I bought the mushrooms and took them as we were told. Then we decided it would be best to be in our hotel room when whatever was going to happen, happened. As we were walking back through streets with women standing behind glass doors and windows, and drug dealers approaching us, I said to Liz, “It’s the middle of winter and we’re the only tourists here. All of these people are depending on you and me to supply them. We are the bottom fish here.”

  It took some time for the mushrooms to take effect. For a little while nothing happened. I knew a man who went to Barbados and spent $100 to buy grass—and the dealer sold him grass. Real grass. I wondered if I had bought real mushrooms. But by the time we got back to our room the mushrooms were just beginning to take effect. It came onto me slowly, but when it hit me full force it was terrifying. My experience started with grotesque figures coming out of the walls. This wasn’t The Twilight Zone, there was no gremlin ripping apart the wing of an airplane, this was a hotel room in Amsterdam, and I had taken something that let loose the monsters. They were, in every way except reality, real to me.

  I had never experienced anything like it. The hotel room’s walls had become porous and these grotesque creatures were oozing out of them. There was no comic book appearance to them; these were real. I reached over to Liz and my arms began extending and kept growing longer and longer. I can’t describe what I was feeling as terrified; it was beyond that. I was frightened by these apparitions, but I was also mystified and fascinated. For me, one of my great fears has always been losing control of my fate, and I was losing control. The thing that kept me securely anchored to reality was the knowledge that Liz was sitting on the bed right next to me, no matter how far away that seemed to be. Finally I said to her, “Are you okay?”

  “I am,” she replied in an almost dreamy voice. “Isn’t this the most beautiful thing you have ever seen!”

  It was only then that I discovered she was on a completely different trip. For me, it was all monsters and dangers; for Liz, it was world peace. She told me she saw harmony and gentleness, a world of swirling colors. Her experience was beauty; mine was chaos. I went to the bottom of my soul: My greatest fear is dying, and this experience brought my mind to that place. My fear of death is lurking not far from the surface, and whatever else this touched, it took me there. I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to go as far as possible away from that place.

  I haven’t touched a psychedelic since that day. As I learned, when your mind is altered you can go to a beautiful place or an ugly place. Again, for me, and only for me, I’m glad I did this. What I learned mostly from this experience was that I didn’t want to experience it again.

  It is amazing to be able to have reached my age and be able to say that I have no regrets about the adventures that I’ve taken. I’ve certainly experienced fear; I’ve hung from a mountain wondering how I was ever going to be able to get up or down. I’ve stood motionless on a glacier without another human being in sight, too scared to move and counting the seconds until the helicopter reappeared. I’ve seen the most brutal poverty and the greatest wealth. And through it all I have only a few regrets: My greatest regret is that I once was a hunter and I killed beautiful animals. I don’t know how I could have done that; I can’t relate to the mind-set necessary to set out to kill a living animal because it makes you feel powerful or successful. It chills me inside when I think about the pain I inflicted. So that’s one regret. And second, I regret saying no to potential adventures. That’s the irony; I have absolutely no regrets over those things I did and I still remember and wonder about those opportunities I turned down.

  More than two decades ago I was invited to join a photographic safari to Antarctica. The plan was to meet a photographer from National Geographic in Patagonia and from there take a boat to Antarctica, where we would do a photo essay on penguins. Penguins! I love penguins. Everybody loves penguins. And we were going to shoot them with a camera! This was about a year after Nerine had died and I had recently started dating Liz.

  I wanted to go, but I did not want to go to a desolate place alone. I knew I would have too much time to think about Nerine, and when I did my thoughts went to a terrible place. When the magazine gave me permission to bring someone with me, I invited Liz. We didn’t really know each other very well. I told her about the trip and assured her that she would have her own cabin. “It’s the adventure of a lifetime,” I told her.

  She was a widow running a horse business in Santa Barbara. She decided to make a list, writing down the pros and cons. After a few days she told me there were more cons than pros and that she had decided not to go.

  “How could you turn down a great adventure?” I asked, just before I called the sponsor of the trip to tell them I wasn’t going. I regret that decision, although at the time it probably was the right one. I just couldn’t bear the thought of being in the middle of an extraordinary adventure in Antarctica and having no one in my life to share it with. I would have been overwhelmed by sadness and despondency.

  And every once in a while Liz will say to me, “Wouldn’t that have been a wonderful trip?”

  So my regrets are for those things I didn’t do, rather than the risks I took.

  My adventures have often put me in danger. Elephants are known to attack when threatened. Many people have fallen off mountains and glaciers have crevasses. Motorcycle accidents are common. An unexpected wind can throw a kite well off course. Driving 145 miles an hour certainly is risky. And while I have suffered bumps and bruises and cuts I really only have been injured once.

  I fell off a horse. “Fell” probably is the wrong word. What happened was that I was riding and as I reached for my hat the horse suddenly spun around and drove me into the ground. I hit the ground hard. I checked my arms and my legs; I turned my head to make sure all the pieces still worked. After I reassured myself that I could still move, the pain hit. I had fractured my upper thigh, which is incredibly painful. It is an area of the body that doctors can’t splint. It actually isn’t necessary; your leg muscles tighten up around the area to create a natural splint; and they prevent it from moving. The pain emanates from the immobilized muscles. Getting out of bed in the morning was so painful I would start sweating, but I did my best to conduct myself like my leg wasn’t broken. The show must go on, and it did. When I had to walk I limped; when it was necessary I used a wheelchair. The physical pain was as intense as anything I had ever experienced.

  I could not wait to get back on a horse. I knew how important it was to ride as soon as I could, rather than allowing fear to prevent me from doing that activity I love so much. It was several weeks before I could manage it, and admittedly there was some trepidation. My leg was healing and I had been warned that if it should be reinjured before it healed completely the damage would be much more severe. But I couldn’t resist.

  It took months before all the stiffness was gone and I was riding naturally again.

  I believe that everybody has an elemen
t of that voyage of exploration in them. And I think it behooves you to take tentative steps to see what that exploration can bring you. We all fight a continuous battle between comfort and adventure, security and risk. Taking a chance always is dangerous, and we never know for sure where it will lead us. On one hand, there is the passionate person who decides to go into the heart of Africa to find Dr. Livingstone; conversely, there is the father of a young child who doesn’t want to take unnecessary risks because he needs to do whatever is necessary to keep a roof over his child’s head.

  I have the luxury of saying yes because I have a secure base. My life is paid for. My family’s future is secured. I am able to put myself in harm’s way, but I do so knowing the odds are strongly in my favor. For many people, though, security is far more important than risking new experiences. It is very human to cling to those rocks of security.

  But just living life can be dangerous. You may walk out the door and be hit by a car. A piano might fall on your head. A cosmic ray may zip through your body and alter your DNA. Life doesn’t come with a double-your-money-back hundred-year guarantee. Security often is less secure than we like to believe it is.

  I am not advocating that you try parasailing or dancing on glaciers or climbing mountains. I’m certainly not suggesting you drive halfway across the country in a snowstorm or try psychedelic drugs. What I am suggesting is that once in a while you take yourself out of your comfort zone. Adventure has very different meanings to people. Several years ago I interviewed the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield as he orbited Earth in a capsule. That was his day job. And prior to that he was a test pilot, who had spent years testing new equipment—the kind of equipment that, had it failed, could have killed him. But he had another passion; he wanted to be a singer. And years after that interview I found myself onstage with him as he played a guitar and sang. He told me that day how nervous he was to sing in front of an audience.

  For him, that was an adventure. Risking his life had been his job, but singing in front of a live audience took real courage.

  We can all set our sails for our next adventure, even if we never lose sight of the lighthouse.

  7. Working to Find Happiness

  I HAVE NEVER HAD a guru. I have never had someone I could turn to for sage advice. I have climbed mountains; I have wandered through jungles; I have been all over the world. I have looked for him. Or her. And I can report now without any hesitation: There is no guru with the secret to happiness.

  I’ve found that too many people spend a great deal of time searching for happiness, rather than simply being happy.

  As I got older I came to an astonishing realization: I was happy. It wasn’t something I had planned or actively pursued, but I definitely was happy. With that realization, I began asking other people their secrets to finding happiness in their lives. Most of them fumbled a bit, mentioned they hadn’t really thought about it, then hee-hawed (I have a lot of country-western friends), and finally confided in me their own method. Adding what I was told to my own experience, it can be summed up rather simply: To be happy in life, do those things that make you happy and don’t do those things that make you unhappy.

  The problem with that, Bill, I suspect many readers are responding, is that four-letter word: work. Too often work gets in the way of happiness. We all have to do it. This should be the place where I would mention what percentage of your life you spend working. As there is no single statistic I can quote that would make me sound authoritative, I’ll make one up from the Bureau of Alternative Facts: Of necessity, we spend a substantial amount of our lives working. Sometimes substantial plus overtime!

  Most of us work to survive. We tend to see it as what we have to do to pay for those things we want to do. “Work” occupies a significant amount of time in our lives. For some people it takes up the most time. So how then to equate doing those things that make you happy with being forced to work? For many people that is a far more difficult problem to solve than the Yang–Mills existence and mass gap.

  Let me point something out to you. What do the wealthiest people in America do every day? People such as Bill Gates, Mike Bloomberg, and Warren Buffett? They go to work is what they do. These are people who have earned more money than they can ever possibly spend. The last thing they have to do is work. They could go fishing or gardening or bowling and never have to worry about paying the mortgage. And yet they continue to work. These people have figured out how to find satisfaction and pleasure from their work.

  * * *

  The real difficulty here comes in defining work. In our society, work has come to mean doing a job. People get up in the morning and go to work to do their job. That’s not what I am referring to when I talk about work. A job can be work, of course, but work is not necessarily your job. Some people are fortunate enough to be able to find great pleasure in their job. Many people don’t, though, and they have to find it in other places. Later in Leonard Nimoy’s life, for example, after he had retired from acting, he started working—working—full-time on his photography and his poetry. Creating art became his work. There is a reason an artist’s output is referred to as “works of art” or his “body of work.” Leonard’s Full Body Project, for example, which celebrated large-sized women, came about, he said, because “I’m troubled by the fact that women in our culture are congratulated most for losing weight.” His accomplishments as a photographer and poet brought him tremendous satisfaction, perhaps more than he ever got from acting.

  Communicating thoughts and ideas through his words and images was his work. For me, work is the sustenance of my life. It is my work that keeps me moving forward and from which I continue to draw satisfaction and pride. My accomplishments make me feel good. They remind me that even at my age I am still a contributing member of society, that I am able to meet new challenges, and that more adventures are to come. In my case, what I refer to as my work isn’t limited to acting. I work with my horses, trying to perfect my riding ability as well as their skills. I work with my dogs, breeding and training. I work with several charities. I work trying to use what power I have gained from my success in the entertainment world in other forums. My work, whatever it is that day, that moment, adds joy and excitement to my life and keeps me involved in the world. I don’t have any doubt that having that kind of focus can extend your life: Pablo Picasso was still hard at work when he died at ninety-one years old. Work, as I refer to it here, means simply a central and meaningful focus of your life. A reason to be excited when you wake up in the morning.

  I was happy, I realized, because I love what I do. I don’t love it every minute, I don’t love every aspect of it, I don’t love getting up at 5:00 A.M., I don’t love the distractions and the issues, but I have found enormous pleasure in my work. Incredibly, to me being busy working all day is almost erotic. I get a kind of sexual pleasure from it, not quite as vivid as making love, but it brings me such joy. For me, it is the ecstasy of life. I know my wife feels that way when she is working with horses. I know people who feel this same way when they are working in their garden; I know songwriters who feel that way when they are struggling with a tune. I know auto and motorcycle mechanics who can get lost in the bliss of a roaring engine. I know teachers who take tremendous pride in the success of their most difficult students. I know carpenters, and fitness instructors, and chess players, I know writers and party planners and comedians, who derive tremendous pleasure from their work—and never stop trying to be better at it.

  I no longer have to work. The mortgage is paid. But in the spring of 2017 I starred in a movie titled Senior Moment. It was shot on a location three hours outside L.A. With some minor difficulty, I could have commuted. But I decided to stay in the area by myself. More than a year earlier I had been in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the beginning of winter making an extended appearance on the TV series Haven.

  It was a very difficult situation: I was staying in a somewhat moldy hotel that featured remarkably bad food and we were shooting in a warehouse that ha
d been converted into a sound stage. “Converted” is not quite accurate: No sound baffling had been done, it had a tin roof which magnified the thump of raindrops hitting it, and it had no glass windows. Oh, it also had limited heat. We were shooting in one of the dampest and coldest places on Earth where people actually try to live. In November. It was so cold in the studio that when we weren’t on the set we stayed inside tents next to the electric heaters. The camerapersons had to figure out how to shoot scenes supposedly taking place indoors without showing the condensation from each breath. It was awful.

  I loved it. Well, perhaps I loved it more in retrospect. For the four weeks I was there I was totally enshrouded in the veil of work. I would leave my hotel gladly early in the morning to be driven to this icebox of a studio, stay near the heater until I was called, perform as long as I was needed, which usually was early morning to late at night, then make my way back to this soggy hotel.

  It was a very difficult shoot. I focused on the work. I didn’t call home; I didn’t talk to my children; I did what I needed to do for that one cold month in early winter in Halifax.

  I didn’t have to do it. I could just as easily have been out there having fun in the warm California sun with my family, my horses, and my dogs. But I couldn’t not do it. I have always derived tremendous pleasure from working. I like being challenged, I like the feeling of accomplishment I get for doing a job well, and I like the pride I take in simply getting a hard job done. It makes me feel useful, like I’m still in the game.