WDAY AM 970 Radio Interview with Christopher Gabriel

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CHRISTOPHER GABRIEL: Welcome to the Christopher Gabriel program for a Friday afternoon. Red River Valley, glad to have you aboard in Fargo, in Morehead, in Minneapolis. You heard Larry calling in, our buddy Larry in Jacksonville, Florida. And I believe, I may be incorrect, but I believe that we are, for my next guest going to go to lovely Boulder, Colorado. Is there anywhere in Colorado that isn’t gorgeous. Seth David Chernoff is the author of a brilliant book, it is called Manual For Living: Reality, A User’s Guide to the Meaning of Life. And I got tipped off about this book, went and sought out Seth and said you got to come on my program. Sent me the book, read the book, it’s a brilliant book, Seth David Chernoff. Seth, welcome to the program.

SETH CHERNOFF: Thank you for having me, Christopher.

CHRISTOPHER GABRIEL: Well, listen. This is a brilliant book in many, many places. You give us benchmarks for living, for dying, for simplifying, for balance, for setting boundaries. Now, you state the obvious in many places, but you do it in a way that’s not so obvious. Far too many of us missed the basics that you’ve spelled out – this book made me think, Seth. And I don’t mean reflect, it made me think about things I’ve thought about but didn’t understand, and it made me think about things, quite frankly, I’ve never wanted to think about.

SETH CHERNOFF: Well, I can’t say anybody has ever put it quite so eloquently before, but yes that’s very nicely put.

CHRISTOPHER GABRIEL: Well, but I’ll tell you what. Thank you for the book. More often than not, I’ve discovered that you can learn a great deal about a book from the preface or the introduction. And it’s no different here, before we get into the meat, here is what you wrote and I would like you to comment on this, and sort of illuminate this a little bit: “I’ve experienced the fullness of so much life, the magnificence and the betrayal, true happiness and heartbreaking sadness, sickness and health, life and death, and true-love. I have searched everywhere for the answers but eventually realized that the guidance I desired was actually here for me all along not from outside myself but from within. It was then that I found my truth and my purpose in life.” You have to elaborate on that for me.

SETH CHERNOFF: Boy, I’ll do the best I can. You know, I guess, when I was a child I had a certain curiosity for life. I had many, many questions. And so every experience in my life was based upon a question. You know, why do people act this way? Why is there pain? Why do people suffer? You know, on and on I had thousands of questions. And it wasn’t until I was 25, I was diagnosed with cancer the first time, and all of a sudden I started really wanting to know those answers. And I started experiencing things in life and discovering the answers, I started writing about them. And that was kind of the beginning the book and I realized that was through all this experiences that I had in my life that gave meaning to so much of what I had considered valuable in my life.

CHRISTOPHER GABRIEL: Now, we live in a society that, and you certainly touch this on the book, that seems far more interested in obtaining rather than experiencing. Fair statement?

SETH CHERNOFF: Very fair statement, yeah. We identify ourselves, I think far too much with kind of our careers you know; I am a marine, I am a doctor, or I own a two-bedroom house, or I live in Fargo, or whatever it is. We identify ourselves with things outside of ourselves as opposed to identifying ourselves with who we are. That’s why I think so many people when they retire, they have a hard time, you know, figuring out who they are and finding meaning in their life because they spent their whole lives doing one thing, and now, you know, they’re not that identity anymore, they have to identify themselves with something else.

CHRISTOPHER GABRIEL: We’re visiting with Seth David Chernoff, the author of just a wonderful book Manual For Living: Reality, A User’s Guide to the Meaning of Life. Seth, my favorite writer is Shakespeare. I’ve read each of his 154 sonnets, all 37 plays, and I performed in about 20 of them. Shakespeare had one thing above all else that fascinated him and it haunted him and that was “time”. As human beings in the 20^th century, how are we doing at time management in our lives?

SETH CHERNOFF: Well, its funny, I don’t talk a lot abouttime management, but I do talk about a relationship to time, that I think is extremely dysfunctional.

CHRISTOPHER GABRIEL: And that’s what I’m getting at. Yes.

SETH CHERNOFF: Yeah, you bet. And I think, you know for me, and I think anybody who goes to catastrophic illness, or sees someone they love get close to death or die, you have a kind of a profound relationship to death. And I think you have to understand death in order to understand time. And for me, I really made peace with death because at some point in my illness I felt like I was going to die. And I felt like I was close to dying, and then I didn’t. And I realized that actually projected me forward into my path, but it also had me understand this whole relationship to time that for some reason we just feel like either there’s not enough time for the things that matter in our life or running out of time. And we just have this dysfunctional ideology around time and in the end, what ends up happening for most of us is we have so many things to do that at the end of the day, you know, we’ve done our task list but we haven’t done the things that matters to us the most. We haven’t focused on the things that are closest to our heart, and so we just kind to have this bipolar relationship to time that I think we have to get our arms around if we are ever going to be truly happy.

CHRISTOPHER GABRIEL: Very well said. And I want to tell everybody that you’re a cancer survivor not once but twice, and I’ve intentionally held off on getting to that because I wanted you to lay some ground work for the book and explain a little bit of the book before we get to that. But, since you’ve touched on it, you are, as a two-time cancer survivor. How different, Seth, how different do you believe this book, your journey would be if it was written from the perspective of not having been a cancer survivor?

SETH CHERNOFF: Well, Christopher, first of all, sorry for blowing the punch line there.

CHRISTOPHER GABRIEL: No, no, no, that’s ok.

SETH CHERNOFF: But you know, seriously, I gave a lecture in Boulder just last week. And I had one of my questions, I do Q&A at the end, and one of the audience members said to me the question “What’s your philosophy on destiny?” And I kind of have a unique philosophy on destiny, and I’m sure there are some people who share my philosophy but, my philosophy is that there are certain things in life that are destined but it’s not the events themselves but it’s the growth that we are given an opportunity to experience. And so for me, the things that I needed to learn were presented to me through cancer. For someone else it might be through a car accident, or it might be through a different type of illness, it might be through the loss of their best friend. You know, we each are challenged as part of the physical existence. So it was the color of my drama, but I believe that whether it’s cancer or something else that what happened to me and the opportunities that I was presented with were inevitable for my life and without them, you’re right, a lot of the brilliance that I see as far as the colors of my world, you know, would be very different without having the experience of seeing death and seeing life and having a gratitude for everything in between.

CHRISTOPHER GABRIEL: Well, you write, talking about death and that is certainly a subject in the book, but you write something very early on and you revisit in different ways later and I found it a very difficult pill to swallow and we know it’s true. But until reading it, it doesn’t really sink in, and that is, “the painful reality is that every moment takes us one step closer to death.” And it’s true, but we don’t really think about that and we don’t really live our lives that way. But yet, and here’s the point I want to make and I’d like you to touch on. Oftentimes we focus on the fear of death instead of the joy of life.

SETH CHERNOFF: Yes, you’re absolutely right. And I’ll tell you something funny, when the book was first written and it was sent out to reviewers, the first chapter was death. Because my philosophy was that in order to understand life you had to understand death. But then I started getting feedback, well, I love the book but I just, you know, it’s really a hard start. You know, who wants to start a book about death. And then I realized, ok well I have kind of soften into it because, nobody really wants to talk about death. It’s kind of the elephant in the room, you don’t want to look at it, you don’t want to talk to it. But it’s there, it’s always there, you know, kind of hanging over you. And it’s just a fact of life, it’s part of this physical existence, it’s inevitable. And we have to embrace that to realize that, you know, life is an amazing moment to be shared and experienced and not to be run from and we’re so afraid of so many things in life and yet if you have this perspective of death, you probably would face your fears with a little more courage and realize, you know, I have nothing to fear. It’s all going to be okay, the worst thing that can happen is I could die and beyond that, I can handle it. I can live through this.

CHRISTOPHER GABRIEL: And it reminds me a lot of the great line from Morgan Freeman’s character Red in Shawshank Redemption, when he says: “You got to get busy living or get busy dying.”

SETH CHERNOFF: You are absolutely right and that’s kind of what I write about the book. And I really realized that, but I didn’t realize that before cancer. And maybe that’s the distinction I can make to your earlier question is that, you know, before cancer I did have a good outlook on life. In fact, I was healthy, I exercised, I ate well, I really felt like I was living exactly the life that I should be living. But I hadn’t had this awareness that allowed me to take risks, the real risks that would bring me happiness and it wasn’t until after the second cancer that I had that awareness and then I realized that in every moment we are either moving closer to death or living our life. We have a choice in every moment, and it’s inevitable, the death part is inevitable, but life isn’t. You know, life isn’t inevitable. We can either choose to live a great life or we can just subsist through it, but that’s purely a choice. So that was a distinction that I made, that I think a lot of people, we forget about that we are in control of this moment and we can use death as maybe a catalyst to help us live, but not because we’re afraid to death but because we realize that time is limited and, you know, we don’t know how much time we have left.

CHRISTOPHER GABRIEL: And let’s expand on that a little bit, because the notion, the idea and it’s very true, in the grander picture that life is short. You talk about wanting, that we want to fill up every moment of life with as much as we can. So, how do we, and this is what you touch on in the book, how do we create the space for greatness in our lives in every moment?

SETH CHERNOFF: Well, excellent question. And I think the first thing you have to do is you have to look at your life and say, Gosh, what is my life? Where am I filling my life with joy? Where am I filling it with greatness? What does it look like? You know, we have to kind of take an inventory and that’s kind of the first place that I do, I do it in my own life, I say ok, great. What’s the quality of the relationship I have with my spouse, or with my kids, my parents? You know, what’s the quality of my service in the world, is it in my work, in the community? And if it’s not where I want it to be, then I need to make some changes and sometimes there are little changes. Ok I’m going to get up ten minutes early so I can have a little time for myself and sometimes there are big changes like, you know, I’m in an abusive, physically abusive relationship and I’ve got to get out of it or I’ve got to get some help. So we have to look at our life, be honest with ourselves and make choices that are going to bring us happiness but it’s not one big thing. It’s not gosh the perfect spouse and everything’s going to be great. We all know that, its really investing in every little thing in our life, making it a little bit better and over time, our life begins to take a better shape, a shape of something that we are more looking forward to, more that we desire.

CHRISTOPHER GABRIEL: You know, what’s great about this book for everybody and again we’re visiting with Seth David Chernoff, he is the author of Manual For Living: Reality, A User’s Guide to the Meaning of Life. What’s great about this book is that, as I said at the top of the segment, there’s little guide posts that he gives you and you initially look at it and my initial response was “okay I see where he’s going here” and then I read about a page and go “hmmm, no I don’t see where he’s going here”. And he just illuminates things for you in a way that are just really, really wonderful. You know, whether we like it or not, Seth, we are a society, we are a culture of structure, and we are tied to so many things that slow us down, there are things that put obstacles in our way and generally wreak havoc with us. With the time we have available in our life to do things, how do we gain freedom from structure? Because you say in the book, “we are the sum total of every decision we have made to this moment, if we don’t like the results we need to change.” And all of that for me goes back in the structure which is where you have this listed in the book. How do we keep structure but at the same time sort of remove the shackles of structure?

SETH CHERNOFF: Good question. And again, to understand kind of where we are in this moment, we have to understand where we’ve been. And we have to take a moment to take responsibility and realize that, look, you know, throughout our life, maybe we’ve made millions of decisions, but those decisions have defined who we are in this moment and so we’ve got to stop blaming everyone around us to actually look at this moment and say, I’ve got a structure that I created for myself. You know, this world that we live in, whether it’s with our house, our spouse, our work life; we created it for ourselves. And we’re the only ones that truly can change that. And so, again it goes back to this understanding of your own life and what you really, truly desire. And it doesn’t have to be just what you did yesterday that you have to repeat today. It has to be an honest understanding of what your life is about and the choices you’re going to make. And if you can actually make a distinction for yourself, and this is again, these are things that I did for myself that helped me find happiness, you can make a distinction for your life and say “Gosh, I know, I’m spending 10 hours today at this job, but it’s not really filling me the way I wanted to”. Then maybe you can make a choice to say “Okay, how can I be of greater service to my job so that I can be more fulfilled in it” or maybe “I have always wanted to do something else, how can I work my life in a way that actually is going to get me closer to my dream.” And we just slowly make changes, but that structure can be a curse and it can be a blessing. But I think we need to be honest with ourselves and determine what parts of the structure in our life are holding ourselves back which, we put barriers in the way of our own dreams, or which things are actually supporting the way of our future.

CHRISTOPHER GABRIEL: And it seems, we could perfectly roll this into happiness. You say in the book, “happiness is anomalous.” Boy, that’s a fascinating thought. You go on to write: “For it to be sincere, it must originate from within us regardless of our exterior circumstances.” I want to throw this in there and then have you touch on this. In twelfth night, Malvolio reads a letter from Maria and in part it says, “Be not afraid of greatness, some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.” So, as we think about happiness and also greatness, we’re talking about greatness in every moment. You believe every moment in life is an opportunity for greatness, and you’ve touched on that, but there is this collective greatness, that we could try to achieve in society, or happiness. That would require a lot of individual folks’ kind of contributing to the collective greatness, would it not?

SETH CHERNOFF: It would. But we have to start in our own backyard. You know, a lot of us could say gosh I just want to save the world. You’ve got to start with yourself. And we’ve got to start with our own backyard, and I think if we start by fixing our own greatness, then we’re going to naturally contribute to the people that are immediately around us, that’s just inevitable. And no matter what you do in your life, I mean, you make little changes in your own world, people start to notice, you start to emanate this kind of joy or happiness and I think it’s contagious.

CHRISTOPHER GABRIEL: Well, last thing I want to go with here and real quickly, about 30 seconds. You wrote this book as what amounts to a manual, people don’t have to read it cover to cover, they go to the section that they need. Do they not?

SETH CHERNOFF: That’s correct. It’s one of those things in life that you don’t have to finish. I’m someone who reads multiple books at a time, and so I felt like people don’t have time to finish a book cover to cover. This is a book, literally, you pick it up, you read a section, you get an insight for your day or for your moment, and hopefully that puts you into a perspective to make better choices in your day.

CHRISTOPHER GABRIEL: Seth, I could talk to you for an hour about this book. It’s a wonderful book, Seth David Chernoff, Manual For Living: Reality, A User’s Guide to the Meaning of Life. We will have the link for this on the Christopher Gabriel program fan page on Facebook so that people can read about it and hopefully pick it up.

SETH CHERNOFF: Christopher, thank you so much for having me.

CHRISTOPHER GABRIEL: Seth, it’s my pleasure. Seth David Chernoff, its a wonderful book. It’s a book that everybody should take a chance to get and you are going to win by reading this book. It’s the Christopher Gabriel program, stay with us.

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