John Leland: Happiness is a Choice You Make

Transcript

[0:00:20] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with John Leland, author of Happiness is a Choice You Make. John is a reporter for the New York Times and a few years ago, he went on a journey to meet people in America’s fastest growing age group. 85 years old and up. He expected to find mostly challenges like loneliness, the deterioration of body and mind and lowering quality of life. But the people he met took him in an entirely different direction because even though they had totally different backgrounds and circumstances, they all lived with a surprising lightness and contentment. In this episode, we talk about what it means to grow old. John shares the stories and wisdom of the six New Yorkers who number among the oldest old. By the end of this episode, you’ll know how to live better. From those who’ve mastered the art of living. Now, her is our conversation with John Leland.

[0:01:52] John Leland: This all began with a newspaper series that I wrote about the oldest old. People over the age of 85 and over, who are one of the fastest growing age groups in the country. I set out to do a story about the miseries and the hardships of old age and I ended up with a book about the joys of old age.

[0:02:10] Charlie Hoehn: Okay, obviously you liked the topic enough, was there a big response from the audience that you realized, wow, this needs to be a bigger thing.

[0:02:22] John Leland: Well, we did get a big response to it, you know, half a million people or so were turning into the stories that I was writing in the paper but more than that, it was – I did a year long newspaper series on these six people over the age of 85 and at the end of it, I couldn’t part with them because they had meant a lot to me and I started to think about why that was and what I had gotten out of them. In the newspaper series, I focused on what life looked like over age 85 to the people who are living it. In the book, I changed the focus a little bit to be what I learned about life from these people over the age of 85, who had lived a long time and probably had figured something out about life. And the changes that it had made on me.

[0:03:04] Charlie Hoehn: Before we talk about what you learned, what were they doing? What did you notice in these six people?

[0:03:09] John Leland: Well, I noticed a tremendous amount of resilience in them. They’d all had their losses in life, they lost their spouses, they had lost their mobility, maybe their keen eyesight or hearing but none of them defined themselves by their losses. That’s only what other people did, their doctors did, their journalists, like me did, maybe their kids did. It was just, “Mom’s that person with Alzheimer’s.” But to mom, she was not her Alzheimer’s, she was not her broken hip, she was that person who was living a rich life and happened to have a broken hip.

[0:03:40] Charlie Hoehn: How did you find these six people that had this resilience. Because we all know people who are older and they do kind of take that victim’s mentality. How did you find these people?

[0:03:54] John Leland: I did not set out to find particularly resilient people. As I mentioned, I expected to write about hardships and the losses of old age. I just set out to find six people who were really different from one another, they were gay and straight and black and white and Asian, there’s a retired civil servant and an artist who was still working, there’s a guy who never settled down and a woman who never dated after losing her husband of 50 years. And a couple who I met in a nursing home and you know, had this incredible courage I think to fall in love at age of 90 and knowing that it’s probably not going to last very long and one of you is going to watch the other one die and I thought that was tremendous courage and really inspiring to me.

[0:04:36] Charlie Hoehn: What else did you notice apart from their resilience, their courage, what else stood out to you? There was a man named Fred Jones and Fred was – had an infection in the – he was in the process of losing two of his toes to gangrene. And he lived in a – walked up apartment and his closest daughter was dying of breast cancer and I’d say to Fred, I’d go, “Fred, what’s your favorite part of the day?” And Fred never hesitated, he would just get this big smile on his face and say, “Waking up in the morning and saying thank god for another day. On my way to 110.” I got to tell you, I – I’ve been around a while but I just didn’t get that at all, I didn’t see it, what Fred h ad to be grateful for or why he could want another 20 years of it but I knew that every time I went to see him, I left there feeling better. So I started to think about saying thanks to the things in my own life. I realized, you know, if Fred could do it. I really had no excuse not to. And once I started doing that, it just changed the way I looked at the world and that’s sort of how we get to the title of the book which is Happiness is a Choice You Make. Fred could have wallowed in his hardships but instead, he chose to give thanks for the other things in his life. Yeah, gratitude has become sort of a trendy thing now. Where people are consciously practicing it. When you started choosing to thank your existence basically, how long did it take for you to really have that, transform your world view, how long did it take before it stopped feeling like maybe a clumsy exercise and more, it resonated with how you felt?

[0:06:12] John Leland: I think it just kind of happened and I realized it retrospectively. I think I suddenly, you know, I was going to see Fred and I thought, well, you know, my life’s pretty good or somebody else I know has a much better life than Fred and they’re miserable and so, I just kind of, I just started doing it naturally and I looked back on it and said, my gosh, things are so much better now that I did this.

[0:06:35] Charlie Hoehn: You know, the reason I was, one of the reasons I was really excited to talk to you about this book, I love books on this topic and I recently watched a documentary, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, called, If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast.

[0:06:52] John Leland: That’s a Rob Reiner, right? Carl Reiner rather.

[0:06:55] Charlie Hoehn: Right, Carl Reiner. One of the things that stood out to me that I’ll never forget is how Seinfeld was talking about how there are a lot of people in their 80’s, 90’s who have this world view of they’ll take a sip of coffee and they’ll go, “Boy, that was the best, that might be the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had,” and maybe objectively, it’s probably not. They choose to have it be the best cup of coffee they’ve ever had. It sounds like that’s what you ran in to a lot with these six people.

[0:07:30] John Leland: Yeah, you know, people always tell you to live your life as if every day is your last and I found people who actually did that.

[0:07:36] Charlie Hoehn: What does that look like?

[0:07:37] John Leland: Well, I’ll tell you about a guy named John Sornson. John, when I met him, I think was 91 and he had lost his partner of 60 years and every time I saw him, he said, he wanted to die and I didn’t get this and John was a guy who loved to talk and so, even talking about wanting to die, it cheered him up because he just loved to talk. I would say, you know, “John, you wish you were dead now?” And he’s say “No, because we’re having this conversation,” and I said, “Well, okay, I’m going to live in a little while and he want to die tonight?” He’d say, “Well, no, my niece Anne, is coming over tomorrow, well yeah, the next day Scott, my aid is coming and yeah, Alex after that.” You know, he wanted to die but he didn’t want to die right now. He wanted to live just a little bit longer and what did that mean to him, he was going to watch Seven Brides for Seven Brothers which was his favorite movie and he wasn’t going to take it for granted. He wasn’t going to just like go through the motions because it might be the last time he saw the movie. He was going to live each day as if it was his last and even though he had all these miseries in his life, he managed to find joy and pleasure in that moment.

[0:08:44] Charlie Hoehn: How do you find – what’s the biggest change that this journey of making this book has made on your life? Whatever you found has changed in your behavior?

[0:08:56] John Leland: Find I’m more patient and more forgiving of others. I haven’t gotten – one of the things that somebody told me was about not freaking out about things that hadn’t happened. Just wait for things to happen and then freak out about them or deal with them. In this last year when the news has been really ugly and everybody I know has been freaking about what might happen or might not happen, you know, I have had managed to find some degree of equanimity.

[0:09:20] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, you know, that reminds me of something I read by the Dalai Lama recently which is, “If a problem is fixable, there’s no need to worry, if it’s not fixable, then there’s no benefit to worrying, whatsoever.”

[0:09:35] John Leland: That’s great, I love that. One of the people in my thing said, you know, “Why worry about things, I never worry because why worry about it when it’s not happening?”

[0:09:45] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah.

[0:09:45] John Leland: You know, when it happens, why worry. You deal with it, you spend all this time worrying and it probably won’t happen the thing you’re –

[0:09:53] Charlie Hoehn: Right.

[0:09:53] John Leland: Then what he said was – I love this, he said. “Nothing is hopeless, I don’t even know what it means, hopeless.” That’s a guy who is 95 and still – he happens to still be active in making movies but I love that, nothing is hopeless, I don’t know what it means, hopeless.

[0:10:09] Charlie Hoehn: What did you use to worry about that you find yourself not really getting ruffled by anymore?

[0:10:14] John Leland: Am I good enough? Am I smart enough? Am I handsome enough? Am I going to run out of money? Am I going to lose my health? Am I going to lose my teeth? Am I going to lose my hair? Am I going to lose my partner? You name it, I’m insecure about it. Or at least I was and now I just let some of that stuff go and I’m like, okay, well, you know, if I were to fall down and break my hip tomorrow and become immobilized, how would I live my life? I thought, here’s the things that give me pleasure in life and almost all of them would still be around. I wouldn’t be able to play tennis anymore but since I don’t play tennis now, I’m not going to cry over that. You know, the same things, we think that we can’t undergo setbacks and then when we do, we realized that we’re still the same person, our life is still mostly the same, you know, you might think that well, certain politicians are in office and this is you know, a disaster for the world at large. Then you think back and you’re like, well, actually, I lived through a lot of different administrations and whatever went on in my life, usually had nothing to do with them. It’s just as the change of perspective and it brings me much more comfort on a daily basis.

[0:11:27] Charlie Hoehn: John, how much of this do you think is a choice versus gaining enough experience and enough years under your belt in life that you finally have that perspective over time, you learn that lesson just through being alive for long enough?

[0:11:47] John Leland: I think that’s great, that’s a great question and the people at that age really, they’ve lost a lot, they’ve lost things and survived that loss and they have understood that life goes on, you know, especially the women in their 90’s who I spent this time with, you know, they’d all nursed husbands to their deaths. They knew what that felt like, death wasn’t abstract to them, they’ve seen decline, they understood what it was. They weren’t going to worry about the little day to day things. But they also had to make, they did have to make that choice because they had plenty of problems that they could wallow in. And you know, there’s one of the women, she looked forward all year to family trip to Atlantic City and then as the date approached, she was feeling too sore, she had bad arthritis and she’s like, “I can’t take that long car ride. I’m just going to have to cancel it.” I think a younger person or a different person, might have just wallowed in that loss and thought, how that made them special that I can call you up on the phone and say, “You know, Charlie, I was going to go on this trip and now I can’t go and for me.” She didn’t do that, she’s like, “I’m not going to go, I’m going to do something here.” I think it’s to both of those things, it’s the wisdom of the years but it’s also, you have to apply that wisdom and make that choice because we all know a lot of people that don’t make that choice.

[0:13:05] Charlie Hoehn: Author Hour is sponsored by Book in a Box. For anyone who has a great idea for a book but doesn’t have the time or patience to sit down and type it out, Book in a Box has created a new way to help you painlessly publish your book. Instead of sitting at a computer and typing for a year, hoping everything works out, Book in a Box takes you through a structured interview process that gets your ideas out of your head and into a book in just a few months. To learn more, head over to Bookinabox.com and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. Don’t let another year go by where you put off writing your book. I’m curious John, I know the core message of the book is happiness is a choice you make, but I’m curious, what would happen to our culture, our society if you were able to imprint this idea into how we behave day to day? What do you think we would look like as a whole?

[0:14:16] John Leland: I think we would have a lot less despair, you know, there’s a great definition I read recently of despair is not being able to imagine a plausible, desirable future for yourself. And I think this idea, if you’re afraid of old age, then you can’t, right? Because that’s not desirable, that’s not plausibly desirable. You’re afraid of it. If you flip that and think well, we could have a choice about how we deal with old age then that becomes a plausible desirable future for yourself and you can be thankful for that now and you can just go about your life with more gratitude and more forgiveness. You know, we’re living longer, we can live better, we can become wiser people and more generous people, we don’t need to be battling each other for that promotion or stewing on the people that screwed us over here or there. You know, you do that for a while and you realize, all that did was make me more miserable.

[0:15:13] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I’ve got so many questions for you, I’m curious that, I mean, how much power does the individual really have to make this choice? Happiness is a choice. Because right now, we fight against marketing that glamorizes young people, marketing that is products that are literally called the anti-aging. You know, there’s this undercurrent – there’s always a denial of death and there’s a denial of aging as this is not the ideal, right? Your youth is slipping away. How much do we really have a choice versus, I guess, the marketing that we come up against every day. Against the click bait of saying, there’s a lot of despair, there’s a lot of bad things out there, the stuff that were just – our brains are hardwired to be drawn to. How much of this can really be a choice?

[0:16:08] John Leland: Well, I’m so glad you asked that because I acknowledge that for some people, we have no power to make that choice, depression is a real thing and nothing in this book is meant to substitute as the treatment for depression. If you’re suffering from depression, changing your outlook isn’t going to do anything for you. There’s people who have had tremendous losses in their lives and really can’t get over them or might not want to get over them because it would mean parting with the people that they’ve lost. I understand that. But I think the rest of us can move that needle a little bit and it makes it easier, I’ve found to deal with that, when I see that anti-aging cream, I think gosh, that’s stupid, who wouldn’t want to age?

[0:16:47] Charlie Hoehn: Right.

[0:16:48] John Leland: Here’s this anti-growing up formula and you could be six forever. You know, I don’t want to be six forever. Every age that I’ve been so far, I haven’t been old yet because I’m 58, I’ve gained things, I’ve lost some things along the way, I can’t do all the things I used to do but I’ve always gained things and I look forward to doing that in my late years as well.

[0:17:06] Charlie Hoehn: What do you most look forward to about getting older now that you’ve gone through this book?

[0:17:12] John Leland: It’s kind of increased tranquility, I think, and perspective on things, maybe a little bit of more wisdom. I think that increasingly I’ll be able to find gratitude for the people in my life who are – who have just been a part of it. I think I’ve recognized that I love my job, I’m really fortunate to have this job working as a New York Times reporter but there’s other things in my life that matter just as much or more than that and that’s another time with the people that matter to me. I’m able to focus more on what matters and less on the stuff that’s just noise. I think I’ll continue to do that as I get older.

[0:17:51] Charlie Hoehn: Did you ever read The Busy Trap?

[0:17:54] John Leland: No, I know about it but I have not read it.

[0:17:55] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I think it would really resonate with you and your message, I’ve thought about it a number of times during this conversation, it seems like a nice supplement to Happiness is a Choice.

[0:18:06] John Leland: I went on a meditation retreat the other weekend and on of the things we talked about was that lazy business can sometimes be a form of laziness.

[0:18:16] Charlie Hoehn: Right. It’s the truth. What would you say is your favorite story from the book or even your reader’s favorite story from the book?

[0:18:30] John Leland: I think it would be the long life of Jonas Mekas who started life as a kid in Lithuania and he was in school when the soviet tanks rolled in and turned his country upside down. After that, he’s in Germany and he’s putting up forced labor camp by the Nazi’s. After that, he’s in displaced persons camps run by the UN which are purgatories on their own. Makes it to the United States, becomes a film maker and he talks about the hardships in his life and he says, no, I’m grateful for all of that because they are the ones that brought me here now and I was able to arrive in New York just when Marlon Brando was breaking out and the happening’s and I got to make movies with John Lennon and Yoko Ono and be friends with Andy Warhol and helped him start his career and Jim Jarmusch and on down the line. In his 90’s to make some movie and he calls it Out-Takes from the Life of a Happy Man. He’s happy and he says, happiness is a normal state and you know, I think that’s such a valuable way to feel, how can somebody who was in a Nazi forced labor camp think happiness is a normal state? Well, how’d you think that the Nazi forced labor camps a thing that’s abnormal, the happiness is normal.

[0:19:49] Charlie Hoehn: Love that, that’s really powerful. John, I understand that you do speaking at book clubs, speaking at organizations, what kind of messages do you talk about? Are these kind of the stories that you share at those gigs?

[0:20:07] John Leland: I share this in more, there’s so many stories in the book, there’s six amazing characters, I take no credit for their amazingness. You know, that’s all due to them. But the most moving part to me when I speak is always hearing form the audiences, because everybody’s got that one amazing aunt in their life or their grandfather or themselves and they’ll be like, “Yeah, you know, I’m 93 and I can’t walk anymore. I’m in a wheelchair and I get up every day. I’m at it.” You know, I look at 20 year olds and then they’re bored with life and I don’t understand that. That’s the thing that’s abnormal and that’s the thing that result –

[0:20:44] Charlie Hoehn: Why is that? Was that the case for, I mean, today’s 85 year olds, when they were 20, they weren’t bored, they couldn’t be bored. Because of the way that things were back then, right?

[0:20:54] John Leland: Well, I’ll tell you one nice thing. You know, memory loss is associated with old age, it’s a terrible thing, we’re all afraid of it and there’s a good reason for that but there is also another kind of memory loss which is I think a selective memory where we remember the good things in our lives and forget about the bad things in our lives.

[0:21:12] Charlie Hoehn: Definitely.

[0:21:13] John Leland: Each of this persons told me about their perfect marriage, they never got in a fight, the gay man said he’d never experienced any kind of prejudice against homosexuality and I’m like, “Okay, John, you know, sure, your marriages were more perfect and you never had a fight. I get it.” You know, there’s kind of memory selection which does us a great favor. I don’t know whether they were bored when they were kids, maybe they were just as bored as that person who is like, nothing’s on Twitter now, you know? That is hilarious. We can’t use Louis CK anymore so there we go.

[0:21:56] Charlie Hoehn: I know, that’s the unfortunate thing is he was so funny and now it’s tainted. I’m curious, what types of organizations are most benefiting from your talks? Like, which ones are most seeking you out for this topic?

[0:22:12] John Leland: Well, I’ve been to a lot of book store things and I love them but the favorite things for me are like, JCC’s Jewish community centers and YMCA’s, public libraries, places where people can go for a free and whether there’s used to seeing a mixture of ages. And mixture of races and classes, where you can just, everybody can get there because it’s universal stuff, right? We’re all getting older, we all have to decide whether these years are going to be miserable or years of growth and we’re all going to have to work hard to get there. It’s true for the old and truth to the young and I think when we get those groups together, something electric happens and the younger people are starting to learn from the older people and then the older people are learning something form the younger people and everybody’s realizing that actually, they learned more than they thought they did in the past from their peers or their elders or their youngers.

[0:23:10] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, as a new father, my daughter’s eight months old, and I think about this a lot, how can I – what can I impart that’s going to be really healthy for her and help her be the best version of herself that she can be. What would you tell to somebody like me who is in his 30s and wanting to raise his daughter so that when she is in her 80s, she can fit into the mold as the tips of people in your book?

[0:23:40] John Leland: Well, it just stop and think about how amazing, how truly amazing life is and how little you had to do to make that come about. It’s just given to you. You didn’t have to invent chocolate or sex or the music of Mozart and yet you have those things and you don’t have to beat out the competition to get there, that’s all just given to you and we start to think about all those things and kind of makes your problems look a little bit smaller and maybe you don’t have time to think about them at all. I mentioned Jonas Mekas, the film maker earlier and he has this – I went to see him read in a jazz club because he’s – that’s what 93 year olds do and he read this novella of his and he just said there’s a part of it when his friend William Boroughs the writer dies and he just said, “Did you ever stop to think about how amazing, truly amazing life is?” You just get the – hearing him on stage, reading that and he’s got the heavy accent and his hand’s shaking and you think, wow, he’s actually stopping and thinking how a truly amazing life is. Gosh, I can do that and you can do that and your daughter, when she gets a little bit older, she’ll be able to do that and when she gets a lot older, she’ll really be able to do that.

[0:24:54] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah. It really is, I mean, I find myself being struck by that fairly regularly and the goal of course is get to the point where each moment has that profound tranquility and gratitude.

[0:25:12] John Leland: We’ve all had those days when you’re just, you’re kind of in a bad mood and something’s not right and you get some place and you just – you feel the sun on your face and everything kind of changes just in that instant and you’re like, “Well this is the most ordinary thing in the world but how did this come about? What a remarkable thing it is that I’m sitting here and I’m feeling the sun on my face. How many things had to happen for that to come about?

[0:25:38] Charlie Hoehn: It’s true, a lot of things had to go right in order for that moment to happen and just existing is miraculous in itself. I’m curious John, what has been your favorite thing that somebody at one of your speeches has stood up to say?

[0:25:56] John Leland: That’s a great one. I think it was, I think it’s 77, asked or I’m sorry, he’s 87 and he said, you know, “All of my life has been an improvisation in response to the circumstances around me and when I think about what’s to come, it’s going to be that way tomorrow too. Tomorrow there’s going to be circumstances and I’m going to have to improvise my life around them and two years from now, there’s going to be different circumstances and I will make the best life I can out of those.” There’s one of those things, you just like, wow, everybody in the room stopped to look at him and his guy wasn’t breathing all that well and he understood something about living fully. Even with whatever liabilities he had.

[0:26:39] Charlie Hoehn: That’s beautiful. One of the best exercises I really believe that can help anybody with getting into that frame of mind is improv. It’s taking improv classes, improve lessons, it’s surprising how often in your mind you’re actually saying no to things that happen to you or things that are said to you and improv helps you sort of break out of that and say yes to whatever happens, to go with the flow and life starts to feel easier, the more you practice it because you’re not caught off guard and you can kind of get into whatever character it is that you need to be and its fun. What I’m curious is, do you have an exercise or a challenge for our listeners? Something they can do this week to help them start incorporating the principle in your book of happiness is a choice, what’s something they can do this week that could change their life?

[0:27:40] John Leland: Simple thing, it’s not my exercise is to just sit down and write down three things you're grateful for today. They can be small or they can be large and it just activates different centers in the brain and improves your outlook on life, you’ll sleep a little better, you’ll be kinder to the people around you, you might be more likely to do something for a stranger. But one exercise I like is to think about the difference between two different ways of phrasing our late years. You can say, “Jonathan, how do you feel,” or, “Charlie, how do you feel about getting old and dying?” And I say, “Okay, well Charlie, how do you feel about living long but not forever?” The difference between those is huge, right?

[0:28:21] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah.

[0:28:21] John Leland: I want to live long and not forever. I don’t want one without the other, I don’t want to die early and I don’t want to get old and have it just keep going without end. Those things are gifts to us and people in most of human history haven’t been able to do the first. You know, because they were eaten up by saber tooth tigers or wiped out by the bubonic plague. We don’t have that, worst we get is like we lose some of our Facebook friends.

[0:28:49] Charlie Hoehn: Right. Yeah, gosh, I love that. I love that perspective shift, that’s so simple but it’s really profound. Thank you for sharing that. How can our listeners connect with you and follow you?

[0:29:06] John Leland: I’m dying to hear from people, we all have like an amazing elder in our lives or we are that amazing elder and somebody else’s life. I wish you would send me your stories and my book is Happiness is the Choice You Make and my website is happinessisachoiceyoumake.com.

[0:29:24] Charlie Hoehn: Excellent.

[0:29:24] John Leland: There’s a link there to contact me and gosh, send me your story, link and send me a video, send me whatever you like and I promise I’ll respond to you.

[0:29:33] Charlie Hoehn: Excellent, send in stories of your remarkable elders in your lives. John, this was great, this is like one of my favorite conversations to have. Thank you for writing this book and thank you for being on the show.

[0:29:47] John Leland: Charlie, thank you so much for having me in, for asking such great questions.

[0:29:51] Charlie Hoehn: My pleasure. Many thanks to John Leland for being on the show. You can buy his book, Happiness is a Choice You Make on Amazon.com. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about book with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.