Cool interview on NPR

Last night I heard a really great interview with Michael J. Fox on NPR.  I wasn't expecting much, just listening to NPR's most emailed stories of the day, but I really liked a lot of what he had to say.  I've cut and pasted the bits I liked from the transcript.

The first excerpt is his interpretation of loss and failure and disappointment.  I've been thinking lately about how, not only have I learned a lot from the tougher times in my life, but that I actually feel defined by them.  And not by my successes.  In fact, I can't even think of a single life-event that I would define as a success.  I'm so lucky and privileged in life, that all of the things that might be considered "successes", I view as things I should be doing anyway.  

SIMON: Mr. Fox, do you learn more from success or disappointment and even failure?

Mr. FOX: I think you learn more from disappointment. But I think that success loses its sheen after a while and you begin to see that there's no such thing as absolute success, that there's always failure and there's always disappointment and there's always loss. But the secret is learning from the loss and realizing that none of those holes are vacuums.

Theyll be filled up. And if you try to fill them up with ego or a kind of immediate gratification, you're going to short-shrift yourself and you're going to lose the opportunity to find out what happens when you give the loss space to fill itself and let life kind of come in and fill the cracks.

The second excerpt is him talking about his Parkinson's disease.  I can only hope that if my body fails due to MS I can maintain such a positive attitude:

Mr. FOX: And so I have a choice: I can either kind of quit and say, well, you know, this is not ideal, I'm going to give in. Or I can just push through.

The thing about, that Im always trying to explain to people - because so much of the time, actually, my pills are working and Im feeling great. And people say you look so good and you look so smooth, and I have to remind them and myself that when I am smooth and I am - the medication is working, thats not my natural state.

My natural state is one thats affected by the shortage of dopamine production in my brain. So my natural state is to be halting and at times tremulous and kind of just physically disturbed. I mean thats my natural state, given the situation in my brain. But Im always as happy either way. And so when it comes to me, body language lies.

The last excerpt that I enjoyed was about expectations.  Not only the expectations of others but the expectations of ourselves.  I wish I could unburden myself with such expectations. Because, really, it's awful. I'll never live up to them. I especially like the quote: "I think your happiness grows in direct proportion to your acceptance and in inverse proportion to your expectations." I suppose this is part of the philosophy behind radical acceptance.

SIMON: Mr. Fox, can I ask - do you think people have expectations of you?

Mr. FOX: It doesnt really matter, because I think they may, but Im pretty set on my path and pretty comfortable with what Im doing. And I have enough experience to know that I seem to be pleasing the people who I most want to please. And when Im not pleasing them, Im learning from their disappointment and it's pushing me in the right direction.

So I dont burden myself too much with others' expectations or even my own expectations. I think your happiness grows in direct proportion to your acceptance and in inverse proportion to your expectations. It's just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, or doing the next right thing, so to speak.

Food for thought.