“Fit”
WVXU, public radio, 91.7 FM
Julie Isphording … Life Medicine … I’ve read it and
re-read it, and it’s dog-eared, and I turn to different stories all the time
and find inspiration during certain points in my life. But, what is Life Medicine about
according to you, the author?
Dr. Nancy Spence: Well, if I had to sum it up in a few words, I
would say that ...[Life Medicine]--[is] about
how to live a fulfilling, passionate, meaningful life-- one we won’t regret in
the end.
J. I. … You
even have comic strips in the book….
N. S. There are
selections from 90 authors and yes, there are comic strips. I think it’s nice to have fun on the journey
of life, and sometimes comic strips can sum [things] up succinctly.
J. I. I know; I love them—those are my favorite….
This book is a page-turner. You keep
looking for more and more.
It’s the time of year many of us are making resolutions. A lot of us have already given up on our
resolutions. What insights does Life
Medicine offer on how to achieve the [dreams] we’ve set for ourselves?
N. S. Well,
researchers say that success with our dreams is a matter of knowing which stage
of … change we are in and what the stumbling blocks are at each stage … and
then employing … strategies to overcome those roadblocks.
To give you a quick overview …— initially, we go through a stage where we realize the
cost of what we are doing now. For
example, we are in a job we’ve outgrown, and a light bulb suddenly goes off in
our head: “Oh, that’s why I’m tired
and irritable all the time!”
Or we’ve always wanted to get a college degree, or hike the
The stumbling block at this stage is always fear… that doing
something different might threaten our relationships; that the financial risks
might be too huge; that we will try it and get hurt or it won’t work out; that
we don’t have the time; that other people will disapprove, or whatever.
There is a story in Life Medicine by a San Francisco newspaper
reporter—Mike Macintyre is his name—who realized one lunch hour as he was
sitting eating his turkey sandwich that he had a job with good pay and
wonderful perks, he had a beautiful apartment and wonderful girlfriend. But he said he realized that he had played
life too close to the vest, and he had never really lived his life.
Well, of course, when he announced that he was quitting a perfectly
good job to walk without a penny from the Pacific Ocean to Cape Fear, North
Carolina, everyone lined up to offer their advice. His brother said, “I hate
being broke and having to scrounge.” His dad said, “You are going to get
rousted by the cops.” And his grandmother warned him that he was going to “get
raped out there on the road.”
I think Mary Oliver, the poet, has written a wonderful poem that does a
powerful job of articulating the sway of what I call these “guardians at the
gate to our larger life” and how we finally, when the time is right, must walk
past them.
She says, “One day you finally knew what you had to do and began,
though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice though the whole
began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles mend my life each
voice cried, but you didn’t stop. You knew what you had to do.”
And then she goes on to say, “though the very foundations were
shaking and though the melancholy was terrible, it was already late enough and
you needed to get started.”
Robyn Davidson who trekked 1700 miles by herself on a camel across the
Australian outback says the most difficult part of any venture is going to be
the decision to act, and that our fears are paper tigers when we look back.
She said—she has written a book about her adventures called Tracks—
“One really can do anything one decides to do. One really can act to change one’s life for
the better.”
I would say that most of our
New Year’s resolutions are probably less dramatic than taking a camel across
J. I. It’s not on my list!
N. S. –but because
most of us are going to need help at this getting-started stage so that we get
past simply thinking about sending resumes or getting past simply
thinking about signing up for the gym, whatever, there is an
entire chapter in Life Medicine on “the do’s and don’ts of risking” and
how to deal with our fears.
Now, the second
stage of successfully moving toward our dreams is to test it out before we take
the big plunge.
Some people like to jump right in and do things right away, but
research seems to suggest that taking little steps along the way, making a
plan, making a timetable, asking questions before we do the real thing, is the
way that leads to success.
For example, we run the bike trail at
And then there is a third stage when we finally take the big
action: We actually hike the
The musician Sting…do you know what he did before he became a rock
musician? He was a teacher. He was 24
years-old. He had a wife and a new baby,
and, at this point in his life, he decided to give it all up to join a rock
band. He calls this stage when we actually take the action … “a leap into cold
water that can actually carry you into a state of grace.” [These] are the words that Sting uses.
I think the
challenge at this stage is to hang in when the going gets tough. You mentioned people already breaking their
resolutions. The stats say that one-third of people have already broken their
resolutions within two weeks. But, if we can hold out for a month, the chances
are that three-quarters of us will make it to the end.
J. I. We are talking with Dr. Nancy Spence, a truly
inspiring woman who put together the wonderful book, Life Medicine: Wisdom
for Extraordinary Living. It’s like
an inspiration cookbook, in my words, or maybe we’ll call it Life 101. We are
going to talk more with her here at “FIT” and WVXU and the X-Star Network.
[BREAK]
J. I. I’m Julie Isphording, and you are listening to “FIT,” and today we
are getting a healthy dose of inspiration about making the most of our lives,
and our guest today is Dr. Nancy Spence.
She wrote the book, I love this thing:
Life Medicine: Wisdom for Extraordinary Living.
It is [a] chapter-by-chapter compilation of tons of stories. Some of them you may know, some of them you
may not know. But all of them are
inspiring in some form or fashion…
And, Dr. Spence, one of the chapters is called, “Don’t Die
Wondering.” “Don’t Die Wondering” is
actually the title of one of the chapters, and you open with a personal story
of risk-taking that could have killed you.
Now, how do we sort out the difference between risks we need to take
and those that simply would put our lives in peril? I mean, how do you define
the difference in the word risk?
N. S. Well, first
let me share my story. Six years ago I was with a group in
It was like being on a kamikaze mission. Our van had balding tires, and
the steering wheel was on the wrong side of the vehicle, and our driver seemed
to be nodding to sleep. Yet, he would accelerate to pass anything in front of
us, right at the point as we were rounding turns in the road with drop-offs
hundreds of feet into a churning river below us.
As we speeded ahead, we encountered wreck after spectacular wreck, as
anyone who has been to that part of the [world] will remember. There was a bus that had plunged into the
river just hours earlier, and there was a truck that had overturned in the
chasm with the driver still inside as we passed, and there was crushed shell of
another bus that had been abandoned in a ditch.
And, through it all I kept asking myself, “What am I doing on this
highway?” And I had a flash on insight what it must be like for people
meeting unexpected death. And the
thought that kept going through my mind was, “Oh, no, not yet. I am not ready. I haven’t done all the things that I want to
do!”
It wasn’t until I was safely back in Ohio that
I realized that the journey to authentic living, as described in culture after
culture, is #1: being called away from what’s familiar; #2: taking the risk to answer that
call; #3: encountering a road of
trials-- which I was in the Himalayas—and eventually receiving blessings which
we are required to come back and share.
Now, one of the lessons for me is that I finally got it, on a cellular
level, not just in my head, that our time on earth is brief, so we better be living now the life that we say matters to us.
Now, obviously if I had been one of the passengers in the doom vehicles
I might view things differently. Yet, I think Helen Keller was right when she
said, “Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.”
Interestingly, studies report that people who
describe high well-being in their fifties and high well-being in their sixties
have lived lives of risk, including risks that failed. More people, in one
study that I read recently, over the age of sixty-five regretted what they hadn’t
risked more than what they had risked that hadn’t turned out the way
they had wished.
Now, this does not
mean--to get back to your question-- that we take foolhardy risks for the sole
purpose of thrills. The risks that we do
take are things that flow from who we are, from what matters deeply to us and
what our purpose in life is.
To give you one more story—several years ago, I was in
For me, jumping off that trestle wasn’t a risk worth taking because,
for me, it didn’t spring from what mattered deeply. It was more of an
adrenaline rush, or would have been if I had have done it.
Now, on the other hand, in two weeks I will be camping with a tribe on
And I have to say that, while my bungee-jumping acquaintances might not
risk my adventure, being eating by a lion is a risk—and I think it is a remote
risk—that I will take as a cultural exchange with the Hadza
people is something that matters deeply to me.
So, my point is: what is a risk
for one person may be foolhardiness for someone else.
That really entails that we know who we are, we do know what matters to
us and, of course, we don’t know that unless we stop, we spend time in
solitude, we listen to who we really are within (and there are whole chapters
in Life Medicine on those topics as well).
J. I. Yeah, we will
check in with you after you get back from spending time with the lions and the
tigers and the bears. My goodness, gracious!
… Nancy, there is another harrowing story in Life Medicine on a
climber—you know, the one where he is lost on Mount Everest. What does his
story tell us about achieving the goals that we set for ourselves? Why did you
put that in [Life Medicine]?
N. S. This is a true
story about a mountain climber who spent a decade preparing to
This climber had apparently waited for days for a break in the weather
to make his ascent. The break finally
came. He did get to the pinnacle of
Everest, but on his way down the summit, which I understand is the most
dangerous part of the trip, the break in the weather abruptly closed, and he
found himself in a total whiteout.
He was exhausted. He was running
low on oxygen. He was lost. He was fighting panic. And he knew, if he stopped, he would freeze
within minutes. So what he did, he said, was he kept going—moving one step
forward and another step forward, moving one inch at a time forward, forward
and forward.
And when he thought he could take it no longer, suddenly a gust of wind
opened a seam of light, and he looked in front of him, and there, a mere one
hundred yards away, was camp, and within minutes he was safely inside his tent.
This story I think
has a lot to say about achieving our dreams, achieving our goals, our
resolutions as it reflects the research that tells us that two things are more
crucial to success than anything else:
one is that we must have passion for what we are doing--he obviously
did—that that is more important than talent, brains, money or anything
else.
And the second
thing is that we must have persistence… keep at it and keep at it, even when we
seem to be making little progress.
J. I. Never let
yourself off the hook! Well, how do you
get the book because people should have it and read it and re-read it?
N. S. It is available at Joseph Beth Booksellers
[in