[00:01.27]7.Eating the Cookie
[00:04.65]One of my patients, a successful businessman,
[00:07.91]tells me that before his cancer he would become depressed unless things went a certain way.
[00:14.23]Happiness was “having the cookie.”
[00:17.34]If you had the cookie, things were good.
[00:20.39]If you didn’t have the cookie, life wasn’t worth a damn.
[00:24.25]Unfortunately, the cookie kept changing.
[00:27.74]Some of the time it was money, sometimes power, sometimes sex.
[00:33.83]At other times, it was the new car, the biggest contract, the most prestigious address.
[00:40.70]A year and a half after his diagnosis of prostate cancer he sits shaking his head ruefully.
[00:47.67]“It’s like I stopped learning how to live after I was a kid.
[00:52.57]When I give my son a cookie, he is happy.
[00:55.18]If I take the cookie away or it breaks, he is unhappy.
[00:59.10]But he is two and a half and I am forty-three.
[01:02.48]It’s taken me this long to understand that the cookie will never make me happy for long.
[01:08.03]The minute you have the cookie it starts to crumble or you start to worry about it crumbling
[01:14.23]or about someone trying to take it away from you.
[01:16.52]You know, you have to give up a lot of things to take care of the cookie,
[01:21.20]to keep it from crumbling and be sure that no one takes it away from you.
[01:25.23]You may not even get a chance to eat it because you are so busy just trying not to lose it.
[01:30.90]Having the cookie is not what life is about.”
[01:34.49]My patient laughs and says cancer has changed him.
[01:38.63]For the first time he is happy.
[01:40.91]No matter if his business is doing well or not, no matter if he wins or loses at golf.
[01:46.25]“Two years ago, cancer asked me, ‘Okay, what’s important? What is really important?’
[01:53.12]Well, life is important. Life.
[01:56.61]Life any way you can have it, life with the cookie, life without the cookie.
[02:01.87]Happiness does not have anything to do with the cookie; it has to do with being alive.
[02:07.33]Before, who made the time?"
[02:10.51]He pauses thoughtfully. "Damn, I guess life is the cookie.”
