Category Archives: Survivorship

Barbara Ehrenreich and Positive Thinking

Sep 1, 2014 Cancer, Caregivers, Keeping Your Chin Up, Survivorship Leave a Comment

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

I wanted to share this interview with Jon Stewart and Barbara Ehrenreich, whose new book “Bright-Sided” discusses the dark side of positive thinking: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-14-2009/barbara-ehrenreich

Many times, when you are coping with an unexpected disappointment or particularly challenging time in your life (like cancer), people (even people you love) try to help you feel better by suggesting you just “think positive” and “don’t dwell on the negative.” I talk about this in Chapter Five of my book, Recipe For Lemonade.

I can’t tell you how annoying this is for someone going through cancer.

Now, there is a difference between a heartfelt, “It won’t always be like this; hang in there,” (which I love) and a somewhat self-righteous, The Secret/Law Of Attraction-motivated attitude that implies a person can bring misfortune on themselves deliberately through a combination of their thoughts and the science (or magic) of quantum physics.

I myself have been buoyed by hugs, e-mails with supportive, encouraging messages, and belly laughs brought on by joking coworkers. Whether these things have changed my white blood cell counts remains to be seen, but I do know that they have given me a reason to get up in the morning – something to keep living for – which is very motivating when you’re fighting for your life. To put it frankly, these things can be the difference between wanting to live and wanting to die. What they cannot do, however, is cure cancer.

We don’t want to believe this, of course. We want saving someone’s life to be as simple as the power of prayer. We don’t want to believe that sometimes, people die and there is nothing you can do to stop it. That’s a terrible world to live in, isn’t it? A world where someone you love, no matter how much you love them, or how much they love you, can be beaten by a lack of T-cells. And yet, this is the world we live in, and no amount of happy thoughts can change it. Why is it we can believe positive thinking can cure cancer, but it can’t cure AIDS? Why do scores of people bash chemotherapy when it has saved millions of lives? I know it’s not perfect, but it’s ALL WE’VE GOT. If you have a better solution, for God’s sake, get some medical training and go prove it at the Mayo Clinic, because we could certainly use an alternative. But don’t sit there when you haven’t had a doctor tell you that you could die if you don’t do what they say, and then suggest I meditate on rainbows to shrink my tumor.

When people I love tell me not to be so negative (i.e., realistic) about cancer and the ramifications of having had it, I wish that, for just a moment, they could be in my shoes. That, for just a moment, they could feel the fainting heart and nauseous stomach that comes with a cancer diagnosis. The sinking feeling that accompanies the realization that the life you thought lay before you – the one you were working towards, hanging in there for, and getting up in the morning for – has been utterly wiped out, like Nagasaki, in a split second. I wish they could know what it feels like to go through week after week of treatment – each chemo drip reaffirming the unavailability and inaccessibility of that future – and know how hard it is to keep getting up in the morning, despite your uncertainty about the future. But mostly, I wish they could feel the way I feel when someone suggests in the face of all this that staying positive can not only cure cancer, but keep it away. Are you fucking kidding me? I want to say. You do four rounds of AC and twelve rounds of Taxol and tell me how to stay positive when I look like Uncle Fester and my future looks like Hiroshima (circa 1946). It is taking everything I have in me just to keep waking up in the morning, I want to say.

Now, all that being said, there is a way to come out of cancer without hating your life and the people who have loved you through it.

The first thing you must do is recognize that there is a pro and a con to nearly everything. Sometimes, the only pro is, “this will not last forever,” and that is what you must hang onto if you want to make it to the other side of disaster. Sometimes, the cons build up so much that all you can do is curl up in a ball and cry. When this happens, cry. Cry, cry, cry. Cry till your eyes are swollen shut. Stay away from drugs, alcohol, and anything else that’s self-destructive, and curl up in bed until you fall asleep. When you wake up, that crappy day will be over and done and a new one will have started. When you get out of bed, on this new day, don’t think of it as one more crappy day to get through – think of it as one day closer to the end of a crappy week, a crappy month, a crappy year. It won’t stay crappy forever – sooner or later, things WILL get better. Your job is to make it to the end of the crap. Trust me, it will come.

Whenever the crap breaks, take a breath. Entertain the possibility that, even if this amazing life you were working so hard for and imagining every day is not to be, that there might be some alternate, happier (or just-as-happy) future available to you now. This is all you have to do – drive the wedge into your crap-centric thinking – to jump the track. Find the things in your life you can be content with, even happy about, and you will feel the crushing despair of impossibility lift, if only slightly.

This is the path to rebuilding optimism – not faking it till you make it, not pasting on a smile when you feel like giving up, but seeking out the reasons to keep living, keep hoping, keep dreaming. Giving yourself permission to imagine new happinesses and forgiving yourself for having a bad day, or a bad month, or a bad year. We only blame ourselves for misery because we don’t want to live in a world where anyone and anything can fall apart, at any time, for no good reason. We have to believe that people bring it on themselves, otherwise we’re all vulnerable. When someone tells you to “stay positive” instead of worrying about a recurrence, they’re either afraid of their own mortality, or grasping at straws because they don’t want to imagine a world without you. Chances are, they have no idea what you’re going through, so unless they’re being a pushy jerk, cut them some slack.

Especially if they bought you a pink bear.

Go Go Speed Racer!

Sep 1, 2014 Keeping Your Chin Up, New, Staying Fit, Survivorship Leave a Comment

Friday, February 26, 2010

“[It] felt as though he had his hand inside my chest… and he was trying to crush everything in my life that mattered to me.”

“You think you can drive a car and change the world? It doesn’t work like that!”

“As the cars take to the field, you can feel the anticipation mounting in the audience. Something is different. There’s an electricity in the air… the presence of Speed Racer has completely changed the equation.”

“It doesn’t matter if racing never changes. What matters is if we let racing change us.”

– Speed Racer (2008)

My favorite song as of late (replacing, yes, even DJ Earworm’s “United States of Pop”) is the theme song to Speed Racer. Whenever I hear it, the beat brings to mind Bangkok University Cheerleading Team-Level acrobatics and the final Grand Prix race scene in the movie, where Speed closes his eyes, finds his center, and, in finding it, rejoins the race and wins. The song gets my heart pumping and makes me feel like shifting into high gear. When it plays, I am suddenly a rocket, shooting for the sky. Amazing what a 3 1/2-minute piece of music can do.

The Olympics have been on my mind, understandably. Some people think competition is about beating other people – coming in first. At the Olympic level, though, where the difference between first and second can be three hundredths of a second, most of the competitors have already come in first – first in their class, first in their region, first in their country. When you are ALL the fastest, the competition becomes about who can, in one moment, bring the best of themselves to the table. Taking the gold becomes all about who wants it most, who has the most heart, who can look into themselves and find the champion that they have been working to be.

What I really love about competition, though, is the underdog – the Venus and Serena Williamses. The ones who come onto the scene and kick the crap – not out of their opponents, but out of our expectations. The ones who have been waiting for this moment to come into their greatness and shatter ceilings and records and boundaries. They are the ones that make you want to shout, “GO! GO! GO!” The ones who will let no one come between them and their dreams.

Here’s to being unstoppable!

 

Of MacQueen and Mullins

Sep 1, 2014 Family, Front Page, Keeping Your Chin Up, Suicide, Survivorship Leave a Comment

Friday, February 12, 2010

The tragic suicide of Alexander McQueen, on the eve of his mother’s funeral, has surprised and shocked his family and friends. What breaks my heart even more is the difference between McQueen and one of his most famous models: Aimee Mullins, whose TED talks have made be both laugh and cry.

When we lose something in life, we sometimes convince ourselves that we cannot be happy without it, that life will simply not get any better. It doesn’t matter if it is our breasts, our mothers, our homes, or our jobs. We convince ourselves that without this, we will live a lesser life, a sadder life. A life, some think, that is just not worth living at all.

It is this refusal to belief in a future that could be worth looking forward to takes lives, as sure as random acts of violence.

Aimee Mullins, a double amputee at age one, is a world-class athlete, model, actress, and motivational speaker. She was in one of MacQueen’s shows, famously wearing a pair of intricately carved wooden prosthetic legs that everyone thought were wooden boots. In her first TED talk, she detailed the story of her climb from beginner athlete to Olympic competitor in 15 months. Despite (or maybe because of ) her challenges, Aimee is funny and resilient, and has an amazing ability to see the possibility in things where other people see only dead ends. “A prosthetic limb doesn’t represent the need to replace loss anymore,” she said in 2009, “It can stand as a symbol that the wearer has the power to create whatever it is that they want to create in that space….so that people society once considered to be ‘dis-abled’ can now become the architects of their own identities and continue to change those identities.”

What is it that Aimee Mullins can do, that MacQueen couldn’t? What is it that I can do that my own mother, who took her life following her mother’s death, couldn’t? It can’t just be that one of us is more resilient, that one of us can move on. It must have something to do with imagination, with this ability to let go of one story we’ve been telling ourselves and create a new story, with a different ending.

I think, it is not the things, the people, the jobs we lose that break our hearts, but the future that we imagine is impossible without them, that is so hard to get over. It’s not as simple as, “If I have a mastectomy, I’ll never have cleavage again.” It’s about the children you’ll never breastfeed, isn’t it? We’ve taken something as basic as an appendage, a lump of skin, and turned it into something so much harder to lose: motherhood. Can I be a mother without breasts? Can Aimee Mullins be a runner without legs? Of course. Of course.

Perhaps what saves lives is something you say to yourself, when the world you were supposed to be heir to is turning to dust in your hands: You can go on. You can be happy again. It’s possible.

Is it Hot in Here, or Is it Just Me?

Aug 19, 2014 Keeping Your Chin Up, Staying Fit, Survivorship Leave a Comment

Thursday, January 28, 2010

It occurred to me this morning, that the world teaches you something about yourself every day. I’ve been doing Bikram Yoga for a few weeks, starting off with a “10-Classes-In-10-Days New Year’s Challenge” my studio was sponsoring (presumably to “jump start” 2010), and it was sooooo hard! SO hard. But, I did it. I only missed one day of Boot Camp (yes, I did both simultaneously. no, I have not lost my mind). One of the teachers said something during class that sounded like, “Bikram says, every day the body is new,” akin to the idea that you never step in the same river twice.

Every DAY is new. Every day, the world teaches you something about yourself. But, you have to be present. Like any classroom, you have to pay attention to learn. You can’t just chew bubblegum and let your eyes glaze over.

In Bikram yoga, the room is initially so hot, you can’t listen to mind chatter and have the presence of mind to move through every pose. Some people can’t handle it. They can’t stop thinking, “itssohotitssohotitssohotimgoingtopassout…” and so, they sit down. Even I have had my moments on humid days or with teachers who really crank the thermostat up. The trick is, you have to BREATHE. It works like a charm. Antonie is my favorite teacher; she is constantly reminding us to breathe, and when a pose it over, she doesn’t say, “Change!” – she says, “RELEASE!” like a drill sergeant. BREATHE and RELEASE… could there be better advice for someone in a hot room?

When you focus on breathing, when you really pay attention to your body, Bikram becomes a journey of discovery, of listening to your muscles and your lungs and your heart, your knees and feet and ankles and shoulders. You notice your body, look at it in ways that you never get a chance to the rest of the day. This week, I got into a pose I’ve never been able to hold before… and promptly fell out of the pose after it, which I’ve rarely had trouble with. Why did I rarely have trouble with it? Because I’d never held the pose before it – by not doing that one completely, I had been inadvertently giving myself a little rest between poses! And so now, my practice (because yoga is, above all, a practice) is going to be about building the stamina to hold both poses, one after the other.

Some people don’t like Bikram because they think it is monotonous – the same poses, over and over. In fact, I think it can be a lot like life – we get up, we go to work, we come home. But, you never step into the same river twice, and your body is a different body every day. Every day, your practice becomes a new challenge, because change is the only constant. You are stepping up to the same starting line, but you are running a different race every time – a race against your last best effort.

The world will teach you something different today; pay attention.

Stuck In A Moment That You Can’t Get Out Of

Aug 19, 2014 Cancer, Front Page, Keeping Your Chin Up, Survivorship Leave a Comment

Friday, December 4, 2009

Ever feel like you’re stuck in a moment you can’t get out of? Like, you keep going back to it and telling yourself, “Had I only done THIS,” or, “If only I HADN’T done THAT”? Do you harbor anger and resentment over that moment, or do you often find yourself blaming all the unhappy or unsatisfying things in your life on that ONE decision?

Throughout this last year, I have been taking notes.

Why? Two words: Joseph Campbell.

Campbell was a proponent of the Monomyth, also known as “The Hero’s Journey,” a literary structure he’s said shows up in nearly every story, whether it’s Gilgamesh or GlengarryGlenross. In an effort to navigate the stormy waters of trial and recovery, I’ve found myself turning to Campbell for guidance, seeking some kind of roadmap for my journey. Of particular importance to me is what Campbell calls the “boon” – the elixir of life, the Golden Fleece, the healing balm the Hero faces trial after trial to obtain and return to his (or her) home. I’ve wondered, time and again, “What is my boon?” I’m happy to say, I think I know now.

Many people have gone through what I’ve gone through. They might not have had cancer, or lost their business, or had to rebuild after a tragedy. Maybe they busted their knee in a homecoming game, dashing their hopes for a collegiate scholarship. Maybe they miscarried after a car accident, or married someone who didn’t turn out to be what they thought. It doesn’t matter; many of us have had to watch our dreams vanish, and imagined that with them, we’ve lost our ONE chance at happiness. Afterwards, we end up living a half-life, hating our reality while convincing ourselves that the life we ARE living “would be happier if only…” We hate ourselves for making the wrong decision, taking the wrong path, loving the wrong person. We beat ourselves up, for what? For not being psychic? It’s ridiculous, but people do it every day. I did it for months, imagining that, if I had my lump removed earlier, if I hadn’t bought a house in Hawaii, if I hadn’t started a business three months before the economy crashed… if, if, if. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride!

My boon is this: a way back to happiness after you think you’ve lost everything. A road map, to navigate the waters post-shipwreck. I put the beginnings of it here now, for all of you who have helped me make it to the Other Side of this.

1. Make a decision, today, to entertain the idea that happiness – YOUR happiness – can come in an alternate form than the kind you always imagined for yourself. Is it possible for you to find happiness without the things you’ve lost? Is it possible that there could be some other happiness in your future, that you can’t even imagine yet?

2. Forgive yourself for not being psychic. We can never know our futures, no matter how carefully we plan them. Trust me! And no amount of beating yourself up will change the time space continuum enough for you to go back and know then what you know now.

3. Because you’re probably already in the habit of comparing your life to everyone else’s, and, let’s face it, you probably don’t know what’s *really* going on in their lives (just as you can’t possibly know how fantastic or crappy this “alternate” life you’d be living, had your life gone a different way, would be), make a decision right now: if you’re going to compare yourself to other people, look to people LESS fortunate than you, as opposed to people MORE fortunate than you. It seems logical, but we get caught up in what we DON’T have (which 99% of advertising has conditioned us to think about, in order to drive consumerism), and we neglect to appreciate what we DO have. Comparing yourself to people who have more challenges than you have will cultivate within you the perspective of someone who is more fortunate than most. Cultivate this habit, and you will feel blessed instead of cursed.

4. Now that you are 1) open to the idea that your happiness can come in a way *different* from the ONE way you thought it could ONLY come in; 2) you’ve forgiven yourself for not being able to predict the future; and 3) you’re feeling a little more grateful for the life you DO have, make a decision to STOP telling yourself that your life cannot ever hold the happiness that some alternate, imagined reality (where you made different decisions) could. You simply don’t know that, and beating yourself up about what you think you’ve lost will only keep you from being open to happiness in THIS reality.

5. When you start worrying that you HAVE missed out on your one chance at happiness, and that you future couldn’t possibly hold anything as good as what you *could* have had, remind yourself, YOU’RE NOT THERE YET. And, you’re not psychic. So don’t get yourself worked up over a part of your life that hasn’t even happened yet, or a part of your life that might never have happened anyway.

6. Lastly, recognize that, no matter what mistakes you’ve made, we all do the best we can, with what we have at the time. Give yourself some credit. The only mistake you’ve made is believing that it’s no longer possible for you to find happiness. Happiness comes in all shapes, sizes, forms, and times, and we can never know when or how it will present itself. Only shutting ourselves off from joy, as some form of self-punishment for mistakes we think we’ve made, keeps us from finding it again.

And that’s what I’ve come to so far. 🙂

 

Rebuilding, One Brick at a Time

Aug 19, 2014 Cancer, Faith + Scripture, Front Page, Keeping Your Chin Up, Pre-Recovery, Staying Fit, Survivorship Leave a Comment

Monday, October 12, 2009

Avik: Why do you want to bomb Dresden? 

Walter Russell: There’s a monster in a room. Once that room was filled with everything that was valuable to him. His train sets, his puppet theatre, his model planes. They’re all broken now. All that’s left untouched is his beautiful collection of Dresden china. You go into that room, you smash all his crockery, then you have broken his spirit.

I realized today that that’s what cancer did. It came into my life and, like an American B12, bombed my Dresden to hell. I was left shell-shocked, looking at the wreckage of what was left of the future I had planned, unsure of how to rebuild it all. When something is vaporized before your eyes, how can you even imagine a day when it is whole again?

What breast cancer does to women is attack them at the center of their femininity – the symbol of female nourishment, sexuality, and beauty. If they are unlucky enough to catch it late, or face aggressive chemotherapy (as I did), even more is taken away – their hair, the blush of their cheeks, their energy. When the dust settles, your ability to survive the aftermath of a cancer diagnosis depends 100% on your belief that life can be good again, that you can feel good again.

Day after day when you are fighting this disease, you feel like crap. You feel like crap for months. The treatment that is supposed to me saving your life is actually killing you – not enough to produce a system collapse, just enough to get you to the brink, because healthy cells can repair the damage, but cancer cells give up. That is how chemotherapy works – it relies on your body’s ability to rebuild itself. You must attack it sequentially, repeatedly, until every last cancer cell is destroyed, even if your healthy cells are brutalized. It’s like a Dresden bombing every week.

I have asked, nearly every day, Lord, what am I supposed to be learning from this? In moments of pain and struggle, I have wondered how losing my hair or being hospitalized or going broke could possibly be helpful to me, let alone someone else. The answer came to me over a few days of Boot Camp, crystallizing this morning when my coach and trainer pointed to the back of my T-shirt with an enthusiastic grin and said, “See? That’s what I’m talking about! SPINE sweat!”

Lou always calls the last set in a workout circuit the “Transformation Set”. It is the set where you feel like you are going to throw up, where you try to summon your strength and your muscles refuse to contract. You’re doing mountain climbers or burpees and your quads are numb, as if to say, “Yeah, sorry, kid, that is just not gonna happen.” Just five or six seconds later, though, they tighten, and you can squeeze one more rep out. That is the part where your body transforms itself, becoming stronger and more resilient, cell by cell. Ironically, am doing to my body what chemotherapy did to it: breaking it down so it can build itself back up.

Looking back in an attempt to construct a Hero’s Journey from my history, I see that Lou has been my unwitting Obi Wan. By challenging me 30, 40, or 50 seconds at a time, he has trained me in chunking it down. Taking a task one piece at time, bearing a weight one pound at a time, crawling through a tough period of my life one day at a time. It is a lesson I could never have learned without going through it, just as the lesson of “this too shall pass” could not have taken root in my heart, had I not used it every day to envision a brighter future. Lou has been my Mr. Miyagi, and I’m not even sure he realizes it.

If you can truly manage to live in the present moment, you will inevitably always either be cherishing or white-knuckling your way through life. We imagine perfect futures where there is no pain, there are no problems, and everything works out. Dreams like that make me think of a parable Bernie tells in his second book – a Congressman meets a friend for lunch and bemoans the state of the world. His friend says, “I know a place in Virginia where there are 300,000 people with no problems.” The Congressmen says, “Where is that?!” He answers, “Arlington Cemetery.”

Life is hard, but not always. The sweet tempers the bitter, the bitter tempers the sweet. I know it is easy to have a philosophical perspective when you have made it to the Other Side of tragedy. Trust me: this peace was hard-won and not easy to cultivate; it took a thousand strokes to paddle to a place where I can look back and see meaning (and even beauty!) in the destruction of so many of my dreams. What I realize now is that, with every stroke, I told myself, keep swimming and you will get there. Miraculously, I was right.

For more on this topic, see my video, “Nothing Lasts Forever,” on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AacAg3eCsCM

 

Survival and Sustainability

Aug 13, 2014 Cancer, Pre-Recovery, Survivorship, Sustainability , , , Leave a Comment

Monday, May 18, 2009

It was in my oncologist’s office that I realized the connection between breast cancer and sustainable enterprise. As an unemployed GreenMBA diagnosed with Stage III Invasive Ductal Carcinoma, I had understandably bigger fish to fry: my house was a month away from foreclosure; I had just gotten a $27,000 bill from the hospital that did my lumpectomy, and it had only been two weeks since I moved my life 3,000 miles back home to California. The truth is, it was a miracle that I’d even found an oncologist who took my insurance and was accepting new patients. I wasn’t exactly looking for life-changing truths.

“With triple negative cases like yours,” Dr. Kuan was saying, “I like to recommend clinical trials, because there isn’t a drug you can take after chemo and radiation….” I looked at her blankly. “To keep your cancer from coming back,” she clarified. To keep it from coming back? It had never even occurred to me that my cancer could come back. I’d had two surgeries to cut it out; I was dumping petrochemicals into my body (despite my green values) so that any remaining cells were destroyed. When chemo was over, I was shooting radioactive isotopes into my chest. Why on earth would my cancer come back? For the first time since my diagnosis, I realized I should be doing everything I possibly can to survive. If not, I was in danger of only surviving this round.

Walking out of her office, it hit me that businesses can think the same way when faced with a crisis resulting from unsustainable practices. A carpet company realizes that everything it produces is made from a finite resource that is running out. A public utility is faced with the impossible expense of building a new power plant because of needs that only exist for two hours a day. Suddenly, something that has been working fine for years and years faces a challenge that threatens to undo it completely.

Most companies’ first instinct is the same as mine was: let’s just get through this. Let’s just solve this problem, recover, and get back on track. What no one ever asks is, could the track we’re on be what led us straight to this crisis? It never occurs to most businesses that the crisis isn’t an accident at all; that it is the inevitable progression of their operational systems and priorities. We focus on just fixing the problem, and five years later, we are in a different crisis, with another fire to put out.

I spoke with a woman a few days after seeing my doctor whose best friend was fighting the same cancer I had. It had spread to her friend’s bones, then her liver, then her brain, and she was looking for an oncologist who specialized in liver cancer. The woman was distraught at the thought of someone so close to her having months to live. “I’m just trying to do everything I can to help her,” she said, and I asked if her friend had thought of changing her diet. “We can’t even get her to stop smoking!” she said. I thought, but didn’t say, then I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but your friend wants to die.

What fighting cancer and operating a business sustainably have in common is that both endeavors are about ensuring longevity. And to ensure longevity, you have to do certain things: you have to be designed right from the beginning, you have to have a foundation of support, you have to have a sense of purpose, and you have to focus your attention on the longview.

Being designed right isn’t always within your control, unfortunately. As humans, we are susceptible to our genetic makeup; we may be predisposed to cancer, or heart disease, or alcoholism. What’s important to remember is, we can still make smart choices. We can defy our odds. When you take over or inherit a business, it may have a design flaw, but if you can’t start from scratch, you can at least do your best to work around it. People born without sight or hearing learn to live without eyes or ears; soldiers who lose legs learn to walk without feet. They may not function as perfectly as someone blessed with ideal genes, but they may have enough resilience and persistence to outlive them. Even well-designed businesses can fall prey to employee theft or an owner’s ridiculously inflated ego. The lesson is, if the odds are against you, recognize your handicaps and don’t be defined or limited by them. If the odds are in your favor, don’t be undone by avoidable mistakes.

Take a lesson from Mother Nature: having an unshakeable foundation enables you to bend and not break in a storm. If your business can be destroyed by a three month recession or one bad customer, it won’t last 50 years. If your physical health can be destroyed by a broken leg, or your mental health by a miscarriage, you won’t last 50 years either. It’s not to say that change isn’t challenging or painful. Adapting to change is not easy – and businesses and species have gone extinct trying – but if you want to survive, you must not only adapt, you must reach out. Don’t take every hard knock on by yourself. Many individuals and business owners confuse resilience with adaptability; in fact, adaptability can mean changing direction every time the wind blows a different way. Resilience, on the other hand, means being able to stand your ground no matter which way the wind blows, and that comes from having strong roots in the form of a solid base of friends, family members, coworkers and customers to support you through those big storms. People need people. If you want to make it past the curveballs life throws your way, build a web of roots around you so you can call in the troops and regain your footing.

I’ve always believed that a sense of purpose can only develop from a life of service. Feeling needed and valued gives you a reason to stick around, and when a business serves a purpose in a community, its customers need and value it as well. It sounds dreary, but as long as there are deaths and taxes, mortuaries and accountants will always have job security! So take a lesson from businesses and people that have seen the fly-by-nighters come and go. Longevity belongs to those who are fixtures in a community they serve. When you see yourself as an integral, invaluable contributor to a cause, you have a reason to fight for your life, because you’re not just living for you.

Lastly, if you want to make it through a crisis and still be around when other businesses are failing or other people with your prognosis are dying, you need to take the longview. I’m not saying, “Don’t listen to economists or doctors!” On the contrary, take any information under consideration, but more importantly, consider what you need to do to stick around. We often get forecasting wrong, investing our efforts in daydreams of a “future self” that is thinner, richer, or more successful than our present self, without actually outlining a plan and taking action to get there. Instead, we eat junk and overspend, putting off the day when we’ll finally take care of ourselves or finally take care of our business. Even now, with scientists all over the planet agreeing that we are running out of oil, people are still driving gas-guzzling cars on 2-hour commutes. We’re building hybrid cars, but the dashboards and headlamps are still made of plastic! Because most people in the working world are 30-50 years old, it’s understandable that we tend to only think 20 or 30 years ahead, but we have to be thinking much, much farther into the future. Seven generations ahead, if you take the Iroquois Nation’s advice.

Had I been thinking, from birth, about living as long as I possibly could, I would have never developed a sweet tooth; I would have exercised regularly and managed stress better, reduced my exposure to toxics and gotten regular checkups. If we ran our businesses (and our planet) looking seven generations ahead, there would not be a gigantic trash dump floating in the Pacific Ocean. NASA would not even be entertaining the idea of colonizing Mars (seriously, why is no one talking about the amount of steel and oil we would have to dig out of our already resource-stripped planet to accomplish such a goal? Not to mention the megatons of toxic construction waste that would be produced by such an endeavor?!). We are acting as if we just have to get through this generation alive. We are not doing everything we possibly can to ensure the survival of our species. We’re like a breast cancer patient who wants to beat cancer, but refuses to give up her cigarettes.

Before I met with my new oncologist, I would indulge in root beer floats to cheer myself up after chemo. Organic root beer sweetened with cane sugar, non-RBGH-containing, all natural vanilla ice cream. I would finish a bottle of root beer and a pint of ice cream over maybe a week, flooding my bloodstream the kind of food that cancer cells love, immediately after dumping petrochemicals into my body to kill them. Within a week of realizing the futility (and irony) of this “feel-good” indulgence, I radically changed my diet and immediately set a five year goal for my fortieth birthday, five years being the benchmark for remission. If I can be cancer-free in five years, my long-term survival odds go up radically. In short, if I live to 40, I have a better chance of living to 80. Where other diets have failed, this one has succeeded, because I am no longer fighting to make it through this quarter, through this year, or even through the next five years. I am fighting so that I can be around for the rest of my life, for years I can’t even imagine yet, because I want to do everything I can to make sure I get the chance to live them.

There is great value in investing in our longevity, and a terrible price to pay for instant gratification. Maybe, if we start taking care of our businesses and our planet and our bodies like we want them around forever, and not just for the next 10 or 20 or even 100 years, we might actually achieve true sustainability.