The Art of Living Every Minute of Your Life

I've loved stories for all of my life I love to tell them I love to listen to them and as a physician I have been put down because I am a storyteller in my profession our stories are seen as anecdotal evidence a kind of a second-rate truth you know a truth that has very limited value compared to data and research but stories have a lot more power than data and I discovered this about 14 years ago when quite by accident I was given a book contract and this was very confusing to me very stressful because I am NOT a writer and my publisher pointed this out to me almost the very first words out of her mouth were something like gum remember you're not a writer do you want someone else to write this book for you and when I said no I'd like to try it myself I could tell that this was not the answer she was hoping for and then she said well remember you're not a writer so be sure just to write about what you know personally and in the end um that's what I did I did write about what I know what I'd learned from hundreds and hundreds of people with cancer that have been my patients and 42 years of being a physician what I've learned from 55 years of living with an incurable disease called Crohn's disease and having had eight major surgeries myself what's been shared with me um by people in grocery stores on airplanes in the ladies room yeah and because I wasn't a writer my stories my memories were all that I had and they're all that any of us have and what I discovered from writing these books of stories is that they're all that any of us need because stories they have the power to help us to live beyond our limitations beyond even our beliefs about ourselves and the best stories give us new eyes they help us to see ourselves differently to see life differently they help us to become more without becoming different they help us to find the deeper meaning and satisfaction in the lives that we are already leading stories are at their deepest nature about meaning and meaning is a function of the heart and not of the intellect I've come over time to see the heart not as a Valentine but as an organ of vision a way of seeing that allows you to see below the surfaces below the masks that everybody is wearing and the mask said life wears to what really is there and you know when you hear a story a story reminds you to listen to life through from the heart it reminds you that even the smallest things that happen can have great meaning and it enables you to open your heart enough to recognize this meaning and to fill yourself up you know meaning has the power to be a source of strength in difficult times it strengthens us not by changing our lives but by changing our experience of our lives and that's what stories do they change our experience of our lives they remind us of who we are what's important what we might do and what we might be and a good stories like a compass it points to something real something that has remained real over time something that can be trusted something you can hang your life on Lopes and his wonderful children's book which is called crow and weasel says sometimes people need a story more than food in order to live and so the best stories are really about the art of living and so tonight I wanted to talk a little about these stories about the art of living and to share some stories with you you know my own stories other people's stories in the hopes that they will help you to remembering your stories the ones that have helped you to live they will help you perhaps reflect on your own direction your own way of moving through the world and so I'd like to start with a story about my mother because it was my mother who called my attention to the art of living by the way in which she died mama was a remarkable lady if she was alive today she'd be a hundred and eight years old and she was one of the pioneers of public health nursing in the United States she had a career at a time when few women had years at a time when women who worked outside of the home were seen as as morally suspect and at one time she actually directed the Department of Health for the city of New York she was 84 years old she chose cardiac bypass surgery because it was her last chance to live and the odds were very long for chances in ten that she would not survive this surgery but my mother was not your ordinary elderly woman she had lived her life as a maverick and as a risk taker and to her the odds look good and so the morning of her surgery I went to the hospital um to discover that they'd moved the time of the surgery forward and I was just in time to kiss her before they took her upstairs and she had pulled me close and whispered in my ear Rachel there's something I want to tell you I want to be sure that you know that no matter what happens here today I am satisfied and I hope you will do whatever you need to do to be satisfied as well and then she smiled her charming and rakish smile and they took her away and these were her final lucid words to me I am satisfied and I thought about them for a long time wondering what they meant you know my mother had a successful career she had many achievements but I don't think it was this that gave her such a sense of peace and ease in the face of Omir certain death and over time her words have turned into a kind of a question how do I live so that at the end of my life I too might say I am satisfied and you know I have come to suspect too that the of this sort of satisfaction is not in the world of recognition or power or wealth or possessions that this kind of peace and satisfaction at the end of a long life is it about the art of living it's more about that than how much we have accumulated or who knows our name or how much we know so one of the things about the art of living it's about receiving all of our blessings most of us have been giving many more blessings than we have received we don't take the time to receive our blessings we're busy we're distracted we may not even recognize our blessings but mostly our beliefs about life and about ourselves prevent us from actually having the things that we've already been given so I'd like to tell you a couple of stories about this um this is one of the first lessons on living well that my mother told me when I was a very small girl and she was a young woman in the middle drawer of her dresser um were silk stockings many dozens pairs in beautiful colors each wrapped in their original package from the store they'd never been worn he's the love to pull up a chair to the open draw and touch them counting the packages and admiring the beautiful colors once I asked my mother why she never wore them and she told me they were too good to wear if she wore them they'd get torn or damaged and they couldn't be replaced because it was wartime and all the silk in the United States had been diverted into making parachutes she was saving them she said for a special time each year in the summer we would go away to a little rented cottage on Long Island to escape the hottest part of the summer in the city leaving our apartment in Manhattan empty and one year when we came home we discovered that our apartment had been ransacked and burglarized I remember walking through the rooms shocked to find many of my family's prized things missing and others broken and thrown all over the floor but the most shocking thing was in the bedroom my mother's dresser drawers hung open and the middle one was completely empty this was my first serious lesson about loss at the time I was always being scolded by my teachers for not taking better care of my things but my mother had taken very good care of her stockings she had never even used them I puzzled over this for a very long time now this is a happening that had a very profound effect on my family my father put more locks on all of the doors and every place we lived afterward had many locks on the windows and at least three locks on every outside door but this didn't seem to answer my questions eventually I began to use everything I owned an elderly patient who had outlived his entire life entire family once told me that all we get to keep our our memories perhaps the only way we get to keep anything is to use it up you know more than 55 years later I think about those stockings with regret there's an even more common way a much more American way that we don't receive our blessings a long time ago the little son of one of my friends and I became very good friends and a lot of the time we play with these with his tiny little cars they were called hot wheels right and he had two of them and we would run them from window sill to window sill parking them and racing them and telling each other all the while but we imagined that we were passing on the road it was fun and I loved this little boy dearly and at that time these little Hot Wheel cars were collected by most six-year-old boys and Kenny dreamed of them and I yearned to buy him more but I couldn't think of a way to do this without embarrassing my friends who had very little money and then one of the major gas companies began a Hot Wheels giveaway a car with every Philip and quickly I sweated the entire clinic staff at Stanford to buy this brand of gas and for a month I organized us all with checklist so that we wouldn't get to fire engines or two Porsches of two Volkswagens and in a month we accumulated all the Hot Wheels cars that were being made at that time and I gave them to Kenny in a great big box they filled every windowsill in the living room and then he stopped playing with them puzzled I asked him why he didn't like the cars anymore he looked away and at a quivery voice he told me I don't know how to love so many cars Rachel you know many of us have too many Hot Wheels to love it can make you feel empty a woman who found a new life after having cancer once told me that before she was had gotten sick with cancer she'd always felt empty that's why I needed to have more and more things she told me I kept accumulating books and magazines and newspapers and clothes and people which only made things worse because the more I accumulated the as I experienced have everything experience nothing you could have put that right on my front door and all the time I thought I was empty because I didn't have enough and the change in her life began with a bathroom it was one of the three pieces of clothing that she taken whether to the hospital for her cancer surgery every morning she'd put it on really enjoying how soft it was what a beautiful color it was and the way it moved around her when she walked and then she'd walk in the hall one morning as I was putting it on I had an overwhelming sense of gratitude she told me just grateful to have it and then she looked at me and seemed really embarrassed she said you know it sounds funny I felt lucky but the odd part Rachael was that it wasn't new it was one of the six bathrobes that I have hanging in my closet I've never even seen it before when she finished her chemotherapy she had a garage sale and sold half of everything she owned she laughs and says her friends thought she'd go on chemo crazy but doing this has really enhanced her life she says I have no idea what was in my closets or my drawers around my bookshelves I didn't know half the people whose home numbers were in my phonebook either many of them never even sent me a card I have fewer things now and I know fewer people but I'm not empty having an experiencing very different having was never having enough we sat together in my office for a few moments watching the Sun make patterns on the rug and then she looked up and she said perhaps we only have as much as we could of Rachel you know how often a life-threatening illness gives us new eyes enables people to discover the art of living and to find a deeper satisfaction in their lives you know in the process of healing ourselves from being sick our values can change our priorities can shift and values and priorities that have limited us for years can fall away allowing us to live more deeply and fully and passionately than before this is a story about another one of my patients that this happened to Cindy's husband when I first met them described her to me is crazy clean right um like her mother before her her house was perfectly organized every draw was was organized every piece of metal shown and this despite the fact that she lived with three small children and a big bear of a husband she had an unerring eye for the slightest disorder one of her young daughters told me that her mom could spot a cheerio on the kitchen floor from the other room and would not be satisfied until the offender arm had picked it up and confessed but cancer changed that her chemo made her so weak she couldn't get from her bed to the bathroom easily she didn't have the strength to cook and the entire neighborhood had invaded her perfectly organized kitchen and fed her family kind hearts and hands unfamiliar with the household rules had folded and washed and put away laundry in all the wrong places her perfect walls were covered with dozens of pictures made by the classmates of her kids each one with a prayer for her recovery each one stuck on the wall with a piece of scotch tape and during the worst of it her husband had brought home a kitten who shed everywhere but whose poor purring warmth had comforted her through the dark hours of the night when she was so sick from her chemo that she couldn't sleep now a number of years later she says with a laugh she would never want to be the way she was before she had cancer I drove my family crazy she said I resented them and all of my guests because they disturbed the order of things I'd been that way for years she told me of a visit to her sister soon after she finished chemotherapy the sister is the daughter of the same mother she says we were sitting together in the kitchen drinking tea and I happen to look into her living room she had one of these rugs that shows every footprint and it was vacuumed so perfectly that every hair of it was pointing in the same direction she said at one time this would have given me a deep sense of satisfaction now it just seemed lonely to her and untouched by life and she began to laugh and she said to me there's so much more to life than a perfectly clean kitchen floor Rachel you know life-threatening illness can shuffle our values exactly like a deck of cards sometimes a deck that's been on the bottom of our cards been on the bottom of our deck for years turns out to be the top card I mean the thing that really matters and you know having watched people sort their cards and play their hands in the presence of death for many many years I would say that rarely is the top card perfection or possessions or pride or even power most often the top card is love you know the art of living is closely tied to our ability to recognize meaning in the lives that we are already leading meaning offers us satisfaction and fulfillment no matter what our lives are and meaning has this power not by changing our lives but by changing our experience of our lives and there's a wonderful Sufi story about the power of meaning to change the experience of work it asks us to imagine that we are in the 14th century watching a group of stone cutters build the cathedral and we stand there we watch these men they're all doing the same thing someone brings them a block they very expertly cut the rock into a block and then someone takes the block away and they bring him another rock and they will cut that rock into a block and someone takes that block away and another rock is brought we watch this for about 10 minutes and then we go up to the first man we say to excuse me sir what are you doing and he turns on us with great hostility and he says idiots use your eyes I saw you watching us you know you see what I'm doing they bring me a rock I cut it into a block they take it away they bring another rock I cut it into a block I've been doing this ever since I was old enough to work and I'll be doing it too the day I die why are you asking such a stupid question use your eyes and so we back away from this blast of hostility and we go to the next man we say - excuse me sir what are you doing and he says ah I'm earning a living here for my beloved family with the money they pay us there's good food on the table and the house is a strong house and children are growing well he says I'm earning a living here from my beloved family and then we go on to the the last person the last stone cutter and we say to him and what are you doing and he turns a face towards us that is absolutely radiant and he says oh I'm building a great Cathedral a holy lighthouse that will stand as a beacon for people who are lost and frightened and alone in the dark and it's going to stand for a thousand years now obviously each one of these men is doing exactly the same work but finding a sense of meaning in the most routine and ordinary of tasks opens those tasks of the experience of satisfaction and joy and even a sense of gratitude for the opportunity to do this work it's very surprising how often people are not aware of the the meaning in their own lives how easy it is to lose the larger significance of our work and of our lives we become distracted by pragmatic concerns and time pressure and fatigue we can become blinded by cynicism and numbness and perfectionism but our lives and our work are full of meaning anyway every one of us lives a far more meaningful life than we know finding meaning is not about doing anything different it's about seeing familiar things in new ways in different ways and tell you a doctor story about this Harry as an ER doc I think of them as the fighter pilots of Medicine and Harry on live on the edge of burnout he runs one of the large emergency rooms in this city he's also very cynical man and one evening in the midst of his very busy emergency room a woman was brought in about to deliver a baby and as soon as he examined her lying there on the gurney in the hallway he realized that unless her OB was actually in the building he was going to get to deliver this baby himself and he was pleased as he told me he enjoys the technical aaja Calallen jizz of delivery and so he kindly told her that the doctor was on the way and that he had delivered hundreds of babies there in the emergency room and if the baby came before the doctor he would be right there with her to deliver her and he'd barely gotten these words out when the baby's head appeared and the delivery began and the ER team swung into action and nurses too stood on either side of Harry supporting this woman's on legs on their shoulders and on their right in the the corridor Harry successfully delivered her of a little baby girl and all everything went perfectly he had freed all of the after coming shoulder there was no cord around the neck the baby was breathing spontaneously had a sort of a familiar sense of pride you know in himself and in his work and with the babies still attached to her mom he laid her as we've been taught along his forearm with the back of her little head in his palm and he lowered her below the level of the placenta he began to suction her nose and mouth and as he was doing this suddenly the infant opened her eyes and looked deeply into his eyes and in that instant Harry stepped past his usual way see things and he realized a very simple thing he was the first human being that this little girl had ever seen and he could feel his heart go out to her and welcome from all people everywhere and he was filled with this irrational sense of hope but it didn't render him incompetent he continued to suction the baby's nose and mouth and clamped and cut her court but this incident has changed his whole way of doing his work as Harry said he has delivered hundreds of babies and he enjoys the excitement of making rapid decisions and testing his own competency but he also told me he had never let himself experienced the meaning of what he was doing before or let himself know what he was serving with his expertise Harry is not a particularly emotional man but he describes the moment when the baby opened her eyes and looked deeply into his eyes he described that moment as a holy moment and he says in that flash he felt years of cynicism and fatigue fall away from him and he could remember why he had chosen this work in the first place and he realized that everything he put into it had been worth it to him now Harry says that he feels that this is the first baby he ever delivered the first baby ever really delivered and he was aware that as this thing happened he had this feeling and being a guy he couldn't identify what the feeling was right away it took him a couple of days it wasn't his usual sense of pride it wasn't his usual sense of satisfaction but it was was a sense of gratitude for being the person who got to be there in that moment and this this event has made him wonder how many other moments of inspiration and connection to life he's missed in the 30 years that he's been a doctor he thinks they've been many so he looks for these holy moments on purpose now and he finds them because they're everywhere and they're in everybody's life I thought I would just share with you a very simple technique for finding new eyes a very simple thing it's a little journal that we get all the medical students to do and um we also in my continuing medical education courses we get a lot of hardened as we were doctors to do it as well and what it is is that you have your little book and you're going to spend ten minutes a night at the end of the day and what you do is you sit down with the book and you reflect on your day going backwards I just had dinner that I was driving home before that I had a meeting with mrs. X whatever your life is going backwards like a videotape until you get to the moment you got out of bed in the morning and you're going to do this three times the first time you ask yourself the question what surprised me today as soon as you find anything that's an answer to that question anything at all you write it down briefly in your little book and then you start that review again from the back from the moment you're sitting going forward to the morning and you ask yourself the second question what touched my heart today as soon as you find anything that answers that question you write it down and then you start the review again and you ask yourself the third question what inspired me today soon as you find anything that answers that question you write it down and you're done for the day now the first person ever to do this was a cancer surgeon who was leaving medicine and his wife gave him the gift of this course I teach probably in the hopes to get him to change his mind and I suggested he keep the journal he didn't want to do this I told him it was cheaper than Prozac and so he decided he said he would try and four days into it he called me up and he said what's the trick Rachel I said what do you mean trick he said well I get the same answer all three days that I've been doing this nothing nothing and nothing I mean how can I be so busy and I'm leading such a boring life and I said are you looking at your life as if you're a doctor he says of course I am and I said no you need to look as if you're a a novelist or a journalist or even a poet you need to look for the stories and there was this silence and he said I'll try I didn't hear from again for a long time and then he came by to thank me for the changes that had happened in his life he says at first he could only see his own life seven hours after it had happened he would see things that were really surprising and touching and inspiring but he'd only see them at night when they'd happen at nine o'clock in ten o'clock in the morning but then the gap closed because seeing meaning is a capacity we build it the same way we build a muscle and he began to be inspired and touched and on surprised in the moment his own life was happening to him and that a lot of things started to change because without saying one word to anybody people started talking to him differently he was probably talking to them slightly differently they began sharing much more with him they began sending him pictures of the life he had returned to them through his cancer surgery they began including him in celebrations at the end of chemotherapy and he says you know I really feel a deep sense of what it is that I'm able to do and I am so glad that I am able to do this to do this work so the journal is very powerful it's very psychologically sophisticated most of us have a front row seat on life and we are sitting in that front row seat with our eyes closed so another on another thing another capacity that helps us um with the art of living is to develop a sense of mystery you know our whole culture is based on the pursuit of mastery and control entire culture we're so deeply into mastery that we don't even see mystery when it happens right in front of us or we offer ourselves some explanation of it which is so far fetched that it's amazing that we accept it and we can accept art that explanation for years and this is especially true in my profession I must say so I'll tell you a story about this that happened to me um years ago on I was a young doctor at sloan-kettering the great cancer Hospital in New York City and in those days there was no hospice so people who cause care couldn't be managed at home they came to the they were admitted to the hospital to die and there was one such man who was admitted to die and I don't remember his name it's too many years but I sure remember his x-rays his bones look like Swiss cheese they were riddled with cancer knee and two big snowballs of cancer in in both of his lungs and in the two weeks he was with us in the hospital every one of those lesions got smaller and disappeared and they never came back now were we in all certainly not we were frustrated obviously someone misdiagnosed this man so we sent his slides out again to pathologists all over the country and the pathologists all wrote back and said classic osteogenic sarcoma so we had rounds and rounds is a meeting of doctors all the doctors in the hospital and the word had gotten out so doctors from other hospitals actually came to look at this man to look at his slides to hear his story and I remember the conclusion that 350 physicians reached that morning it was decided that the chemotherapy that had been stopped 11 months before had suddenly worked and the embarrassing part of this is I never questioned this conclusion for the next 15 years I accepted it absolutely completely you know it's hard to realize to think outside of the box especially when everyone is thinking inside the box but outside the box can be where life is you know and it's hard to realize that all of your hard won knowledge about the nature of the world may only be provisional and life may be different than you have believed it to be this is stressful it's even frightening you know if you read any of the holy scriptures on what an angel shows up in front of a human being I mean about on a mystery right the angel says the same thing remember what the angel says be not afraid be not afraid so it is stressful but it's also rewarding because befriending the unknown can restore a sense of wonder and awe and aliveness to your life a sense of gratitude for witnessing things that you could never explain and we may all need to know a little less and wonder a little more because people who wonder are rarely depressed or burned-out I used to think that Living Well was about having all the answers I'm trained as a physician after all that the more on answers you had the better life you were able to have I don't think that anymore I think the art of living is less about having the right answers that about having the right questions and sometimes the questions that help us to live have no final answers at all and you can carry one of these questions with you all of your life finding deeper and deeper answers as you grow in your capacity to engage with life one of the cardiologists and one of my groups on mystery told us the story of his father's death he had been fifteen and his father was so he had been fifteen his brother was 17 and at that time his father and had Alzheimer's for at least 10 years and hadn't spoken for all that time so he's a kind of a walking vegetable his mother had taken care of the father with great devotion and as her boys got older she sometimes take an afternoon off to go and do some shopping or meet a friend and they would they would babysit their father and the event happened on one of those Sunday afternoons they're sitting in their living room the two boys the 15 year old the 17 year old and they're watching football and day--at is sitting in a chair absolutely a mobile looking off into space and Mark told us that suddenly his father made a noise and clutched his chest and pitched forward onto the rug he had collapsed and both his sons ran to him and Mark said he knew something was terribly wrong because his dad was gray and struggling to breathe and sweating and his brother said to mark call 900 but before you could get up off the rug a voice that he could barely remember a voice he hadn't heard in 10 years said to him no son don't call nine-one-one tell your mother I love her tell your mother I will be all right and then his father died right now in the state that this happened if someone dies suddenly like this you you had by law had to have an autopsy and at post his father's brain was almost completely destroyed by this terrible disease and so mark was left with a question who spoke hmm he says nothing he has ever read in any medical text has brought him closer to the answer but carrying the question with him has changed him he says it gives meaning to his work that it the question who spoke is present in his relationship with every patient his relationship with every human being that at the heart of every human being is a mystery that cannot be penetrated but only appreciate it you know there's a question that I carry with me the way mark carries his question I have worked with people with cancer for 25 years as their their their therapist so I've listened to their stories often they're young people often their stories are very very difficult and you know I have not been sustained in this work by my expertise there's a question that sustained me which has no answer at all and the question is could there be an unknowable purpose to life could there be an unknowable purpose to suffering and this is a question I will never have an answer to but the question itself sustains me and it enables me to do this work with an open heart and so for me over time living well is not about having all the answers it's about the opportunity to pursue unanswerable questions in good company couple more thoughts on more than anything I think that the art of living is about recognizing our power to make a difference to know that we matter whether we are sick or well or young or old most of us are not aware of our power to affect the lives of people around us often people think they need to be wealthy or educated or politically powerful to make a difference but the reality is that there is a web of connection between us and we can make a huge difference in the lives of people on just as we are um most of us have made a huge difference in the lives of people much more than we realize and we can even affect the lives of strangers in powerful ways people whose names we don't even know one of my favorite stories about this was told to me by a colleague of mine her name is Elaine and her field is domestic violence and Elaine is a very small woman she's about five feet tall and she's as delicate as a porcelain cup she teaches at the University of Utah and her um her life has affected the lives of thousands of women through her workshops and her writings and her television show all of this and I went as a visiting scholar to the University of Utah so we're having dinner and I looked at her across the table for the first time that occurred to me how does she get in this field she's such an unlikely person to be in such a violent field so I asked her and she said oh Rachel I used to be one of these women and she told me that her first husband who had been a very violent and angry man but he had also been a pillar of the community been about professional and in public he had always treated her as a perfect gentleman so no one suspected that her her personal life was a living hell people actually envied her her marriage and like most abusers he had told her the abuse was her own fault because of the stupid thing she said and the stupid thing she did and she kept trying you know harder and harder is never good enough for him and eventually over time she became so grand down that she came to believe that she deserved to be treated in this terrible way now all this ended abruptly on a street corner in New York City she and her husband were visiting they're standing on the corner waiting for the light to change and she looks across the street and she sees a really beautiful Art Deco building and she turns to her husband she says honey look at that beautiful building and he thinking there alone speaks to her in the tone of utter contempt that he reserved for their private conversation his sister something like you idiot you mean the yellow building anyone with eyes in their head would know that just like every other building on the street what are you talking about and her reaction was the same she had always done when he was either physically or emotionally abusive to her she just fell silent but a woman standing next to him a perfect stranger also waiting for the light to change turned to him and disbelief and said um what that's a perfectly beautiful building she's absolutely right and you sir are a horse's ass and then the light changed and this total stranger went across the street went on with her life but Elaine told me this was the Epiphany this was the moment that her whole life began because she understood in this flash that she had never deserved to be treated this way she understood would have been happening to her in 7 1/2 years of being married to this man and she felt something very unfamiliar come up in her she described it as a kind of a strength or a kind of a dignity and she knew that it was going to take time it was going to take planning but she was going to be able to find a way to live this man right now this isn't even a story about Elaine this is a story about the stranger because if we were to go to New York City tonight find the woman and say excuse me have you ever saved anyone's life I don't think she'd say yeah of course 20 years ago standing on that street corner waiting to look I don't think she'd say that at all I think most likely she would say to us what saved lives I don't save lives I look like a doctor to you we have all affected the lives of many more people than we know there is a web of connection between us that can all we'll be seen through the heart so they say something interesting about the art of living here I've really learned everything I know about it from my mother but also um from people at the end of life the view from the end of life is so much clearer than the view that any of us has tonight you know um cancer particularly strips life down to its essentials and it's surprising how simple things become and how few things matter and how much those few things really do matter you know in the 25 years that I have been a physician a therapist to people with cancer no one has ever said to me if I die I'll miss my Mercedes and I practice in Marin County cancer seems to help people to understand that the Mercedes and the lifestyle that they may have been pursuing all their life is really the booby prize and what's Matt what matters is simpler and more accessible to everyone of us what matters is who we've touched on our way through life and what who has touched us and what we leave behind us in the minds and hearts of other people and I'd like to tell you one more story about a man who discovered something important at the 11th hour on at the age of 45 George had patented a part of a medical invention right and for more than 20 years after this he was the CEO of a small but very successful company that manufactured and distributed these parts worldwide he was a fine businessman and a shrewd investor very sophisticated fellow who collected many beautiful things and had tried of the whole world and by most standards most people would have said he led an enviable life about six months before I met him in my office he'd been um diagnosed as having colon cancer which was widespread at the time of his diagnosis so his physicians told him that he didn't have very long his diagnosis had shaken him badly I had expected he be just depressed about the seriousness of his situation but this wasn't the case at all there was a lot else on his mind I've wasted my life Rachel he told me I have three ex-wives and five children I support them all but I don't know any of them I never took the time to know them or to know anyone else either I don't think there is anyone who is going to miss me and I'm leaving nothing behind me but a great deal of money and then he turned away and I wasn't sure but I thought his eyes had filled with tears now the thing that George invented and that his company manufactures is part of this medical device which has enabled people whose chronic disease was previously unmanageable to live almost normally and at that time another of my patients used this device and it changed her life before the device was available she was housebound managing her symptoms took up all of her time she'd been unable to work she had no friends she was unable to to literally have a life among other people but soon as she was fitted with the device she got a job for the first time and there she began to have friends and eventually she met a lovely man and fell in love with him married him and she had a delicious little boy what she told me when we first met was the day they gave me this device I was reborn Rachel and in a way I think she was now of course it's a brief apprised you a brief a breach of privacy to tell one patient about another patient but I thought that on perhaps I could tell Stephanie all that I had a fit that III knew the man that I created her device and maybe she could write an anonymous note you know about her experience and when she discovered though that I knew the man whose invention had made the device possible she wanted to meet him she asked if he was willing to come to her house for dinner so that she could show him what he had made possible for her I said I'd ask him George was really surprised that I knew someone who used his device he had never met anybody and he was very touched that she wanted to meet him and so he offered to take her and her husband to dinner at one of San Francisco's most expensive and exclusive restaurants I don't think so I told him and so an evening was found and George went to dinner at Stephanie's house now the week after this dinner he sat in my office shaking his head and wonder he'd expected to have dinner with this young couple but when he arrived George was welcomed by dozens and dozens of people Stephanie's family her friends her neighbors the whole community of people that had sustained her in the years that she was an invalid they had decorated the little house with crepe paper and everyone had brought it was an extraordinary meal and a wonderful celebration but that wasn't the important part Rachel George had told me they'd really come to tell him a story they each had a different part of it to tell and took him almost two hours to tell it and it was of course the story of Stephanie's life and George had cried most of the time and at the very end Stephanie had come to him and said this is really a story about you George we thought you needed to know and I did need to know Rachel he told me I had tears in my eyes but I also had a question that began to come up for me and when he finished speaking I asked him George how many of these things do you make every year close to 10,000 he told me I only knew the numbers Rachel I had no idea what they meant so in the end we may measure our value and the value of our lives not by our knowledge not by our possessions but by our stories in the end our stories will bless us and enable us to know at last who we are what our true value is and to find peace with our lives thank you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 299,425

Rating: 4.7710066 out of 5

Keywords: holistic, health, alternative, medicine, Rachel, Naomi, Remen

Id: Q1xBjIHEhtg

Length: 59min 41sec (3581 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 26 2008