What Sets You Apart Makes You a Part

time as if it's infinite like sands. And whether you are partnered with or without children, or in a career where you want more boundaries, this is the place for you for all family structures. We're here to take a time out to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, reclaim our time. High d D Hi, Eve, I'm feeling a little nostalgic today because this is the end of our first season and this has been such a fun and a really interesting ride with who we've been able to

talk with. So as I was thinking about the end of the season, I really wanted us to address this idea of legacy, what we're remembered for because at the end of the day, you know, it's not always the things that we spend our time on. That's why we're here in the Time Out podcast right to scrutinize and encourage people to make active decisions about how they spend

their time. So the story I wanted to tell you today has to do with my day job, which I don't talk about that often on this podcast, but for over ten years, as you know, I've been a philanthropic advisor. I work with families on their legal matters and their governance related to family businesses, family foundations, families that look like the HBO show Succession. As we've laughed and said, and as we said to our listeners, you should feel

bad for me. But one story that really stood out to me was right before the pandemic, one of my clients in the Pacific Northwest called me and said, I was thinking about you today. I was at a funeral and so I said to my client, well, thanks, it's really nice of you to think of me when you're at a funeral. What made you think of me? And he said, well, I'm at a funeral of a colleague and my client is a tighten of business in the Pacific Northwest. This was another tighten of business in the

Pacific Northwest. He had passed away. There was a packed church, and my client was there to pay his respects. In the church, something happens where all three of his daughters, the man who passed away, all start to approach the podium where they were going to speak, and they say things that are silly, childlike poems. So the first daughter goes up, she recites a poem that's like a Shelf Silverstein poem, rhyming and beautiful and funny, and the audience,

the mourners start laughing. And then the next daughter comes up and she does the same thing. It's a different poem. And then the third daughter comes up and also reads a really funny, silly, beautiful, rhyming poem that again sounds like it was published by someone. And then everyone in the audience is very confused. My client tells me, and then all three daughters lean into the microphone and say, those were poems our father wrote for us as the

tooth fairy. Wow, he was our tooth fairy. And what my client was reflecting on after leaving the church was that nobody talked about his business career. What people were remembering from that day were his poems, the fact that it was probably strange back then for any man to be the tooth fairy. Even now in my data, that

usually is done by women and heterosist gender partnerships. But on top of it, what my client said to me was, I had no idea, working with this man for years and years that he was a poet, such a beautiful, skilled poet. And it got me thinking about how we're remembered, what do we spend our time on and why, And so I would love to hear your thoughts, because we're going to get to hear from our amazing guests, Nor McNerney, who really speaks so deeply about issues of legacy, grief, existence,

existential meaning. But I'd love to hear from you about this idea of an act of legacy. I read about it and find your unicorn space, this idea that we can't control how we're remembered, whether it's this titan of business who will be remembered in that room for his

poems and other things. But I do know that we can start to think about our values and how we live our daily lives that will shape how people remember us, and I wanted to know what are things that you think about in terms of what we can focus on now, what our priorities can be now as we think about how we will be remembered in the future. So first, before we talk about this idea of an active legacy, they think back to this Harvard study it's called the

Harvard Happiness Study. And more than money or titles or positions of power or all of the things, you know, many of these men were titans of business, as you say, and yet when it came down to the end of their life and they reflected back on their life, the greatest marker for happy enus was the quality of relationships that these people had over seventy five years. So when we think about leaving an active legacy, it's less about

the doing and more about the being. There is another really beautiful book that speaks to this, written by a woman named Brawny, where the Top five Regrets of the Dying And she was a palliative care nurse and spent years sitting at the bedside of people as they took their last breath in hospice care. And she asked these people as they were dying, what do you wish for,

what do you regret? And everyone said their most common regret was in quotes, I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. It's about living a life with no regrets. So when you get to the end of your life, as we all will, hopefully for any of us,

we won't have that sense of regret. Shout out to Ben, my ten year old son, who knew we were going to be talking about an active legacy and what makes a successful life and I was sort of joining on and on about it, and he says to me, well, it's just really one sentence, mom if you want to think about what an active legacy is or what a successful life is. And I was like, okay, well tell me and he said, well, an act of legacy, living a successful life really is living a life you would repeat. Wow,

it happens in the small moments. It happens when you're sitting at desk at night and start scribbling that poem for your child that ends up going under their pillow. The beauty of these hard questions is that it's really just about making these small moments matter that add up to a life you would repeat. We're so excited to talk about all of this with our guests, Nora mcannerney, author of It's Okay to Laugh and No Happy Endings and also the creator of Terrible. Thanks for asking the podcast.

We'll be speaking to her after the break. For so thrilled to have Norah McInnerny here with us. Norah is the author of the amazing memoirs It's Okay to Laugh and No Happy Endings and hosts of Terrible. Thanks for asking the podcast. We were hoping you would start by just telling listeners how you got into the work, um of what you do now, who you are, and about

your background. Hi Eve, Hello d D. I am an author of several funny books about sad things, and I am a remarried widow raising a blended family here in Phoenix, Arizona. And before all of that, I was just a regular Midwestern gal whose life had unfolded more or less the way that it was supposed to. I had had a semi traumatic experience in fourth grade where I got a bowl cut. Other than that, my life was blessedly boring. I did all the right things at the right time.

I went to college, and then I got a job and I fell in love when I was twenty seven, which in the Midwest was pushing it. I fell in love with this guy and he was thirty one older, man, felt very sophisticated, and it was so perfect. It was so annoying, like every love story is, which is you know, didn't expect it, And there he was. And a year into our relationship, he had a seizure at work and I met him at the hospital. We really didn't think it was serious. Even when the doctors told us he

had a brain tumor. We just thought, well, it can't be cancer. Those are the things that happened to other people. We will be the people who have a nice, little, benign brain tumor. And this is a story that we we tell and we laugh about someday, and we do. We did laugh about that story, but only because it was a very bad brain tumor. He had stage four glioblastoma and we were married a month after it was removed from his head, and his funeral was on our

third wedding anniversary. So Aaron and I were together for four years. We were married for almost three. We had a son together, Ralph, who is now nine years old, and who is a part of this version of my life.

And I have this whole different life, this whole different career that I never could have imagined, because I had no imagination, and I could not have perceived of a life other than the one that I hoped for and had anticipated having, which is that you do the right things and then the right things happened to you, and instead I have a very different, very beautiful life that I love, and I have a very different career that

I love that I never ever would have chosen. Imagination is an interesting word to me, Nora, because it ties to this idea of a legacy, an active legacy, right, this idea that instead of just looking behind saying the best days are behind us, I would say that I would challenge us all to have imagination, to say what

does it actually mean to live an active legacy? And so the question I wanted to ask you, Nora, is why does it sometimes take and extraordinarily terrible experience for people to wake up, whether it's the pandemic, whether it's the death of a spouse, a d D. You've said that it's been a cancer diagnosis for many of your patients, why do we have to wait for something terrible to happen to us, for us to wake up to say, we are living on a treadmill that has been decided

by somebody else, not us, and I want to live my life by what is important to me. I am so interested a d d. In your take on this, because we talk a lot about mindfulness as a practice, like I'm gonna turn on this app and be mindful for ten minutes, you know, I'm gonna And I did it. I did my mindfulness, and I've certainly treated it like that.

But I think one of the reasons why the time that I had with Aaron, and most of the time that I had with him, he was very sick and life was very hard, but that those hardest days of my life were to date still some of my happiest days, because we were so present, and because looking too far into the future meant imagining a future where he might not be there would most likely not be there, and looking too hard at the past was useless because what

was even there? Like what was there? We we knew that there was nothing we could do to have, you know, change the outcome. I couldn't have gone back in time and rearrange the cells and his brain. So we're so so present with each other. And I do think that when the bottom falls out, what remains is so so valuable, even if what remains is not that great, if you could choose it, you know, the fact is like we don't.

We don't get to choose it. And I wish so badly that I could live all of my life, even those previous decades before Aaron was sick, with that same awareness. And I wish I knew how honestly, I wish I wish I knew how. While your story is so powerful, what's so interesting in hearing you and Eve talked about this is this idea that anxiety is a future focused emotion. Right, that was the first thing I thought about. How you talked about being mindful and that like truth of the

universe is just to be president in the moment. What is mindfulness? And that's what it is. But when we're thinking about the past, there's a lot of regret, maybe feelings of depression and going back, and then we often say that anxiety is a future focused emotion, what if, what if? What if? What if? Rather than being in the now. For many of my patients. When something traumatic happens,

it is a great reckoning. And to Eve's question, that original question of why does it take something like that to happen, I often think it's because we are so set in our complacency and it's the only thing that shakes us out of our complacency. And then suddenly there's that reckoning. And I loved when you talked about that like essence. Right, you didn't use that word essence, but that kernel of when everything falls apart, what's left, and that feeling of what's left and pairing things down is

what we've really experience during the pandemic. You kind of recognize that your time here isn't necessarily guaranteed. That is what keeps us too when we when I talked about imagination before, you can feel bad for anybody, right, And I had a lot of pity. Right. I could drive around the Minneapolis where I lived at the time and be like, Oh, I feel bad for that. That makes me feel bad. But that's different. That's not compassion, and

that's not imagination, right, It's just it's projection. And the reality of compassion and of having a good imagination, a good sense of awareness is that awareness that what you think sets you part is actually what makes you a part of the world, of this universe, of your community.

I want to just focus on what you just said about what sets you apart, makes you apart, because I wonder, um, if we could talk a little bit about that, this idea that I've never seen in this in my research for my second book around creativity and constraints, I've never seen somebody say when I had, you know, a hard thing happened to me. I have never heard somebody say that it made them not feel less a part of the bigger world, which I thought was so interesting to me.

You would think that it would it would lead to retreat and anger and wanting to never face the world again. But that really wasn't. At least my data is so.

And I wonder again if you see this in your communities, where this idea of what sets is apart all of a sudden makes us apart of something, whether it's your text chain of widows, whether it's the community for women with postpartum anxiety, whether it's so many of my friends who have had cancer diagnosis these part of new different communities, whether it's full of creativity, sharing imagination, like you said, empathy,

even some surprise. So it makes me hopeful that maybe if we look at this pandemic and all the individual things that happened to us, could be come out living an active legacy that is connected to that apart a part, not a part, a part of something bigger. And I wonder if you see that in your community. Do you hear stories like that, Nora, from the people that share

with you after you were sharing with them. Yeah, and I lived it too, which is not to say that I didn't also go through just like intense depression and isolation, and also when I would look back at those moments where I felt like I am totally alone, there's nobody else here and everything is the worst. I also had so much community in so many ways. Aaron and I wrote his obituary together. We put it in the local paper. I didn't think they would publish it, but this is

a fact for everybody who's listening. They will publish anything. You pay for it. It's an ad for your death. You can so live it up. And we revealed his identity as Spider Man and it went viral, which was a different, simpler time. Okay, it was a simpler time, and I got so many messages. This is how I started terrible. Thanks for asking. Most of our episodes are stories that came to me where people are reaching out

and sharing something with me. These were complete strangers from around the world who did not know me, who did not know erin, who were like, I'm here with you. I know loss, and i know how disorienting it is, and they were offering me something, and they would share their own loss with me with detail that they may never have given their friends or family members. In part because there is that recognition you might be a safe place for me to put this. You just might be.

And I've tried so hard to make sure that I am that safe place for other people. And David Kessler. He worked with Elizabeth Coogler Ross on the five Stages of grief. He wrote a recent book called Finding Meaning, which is the sixth stage of grief. I have seen this in almost every story that I've encountered as I meet people too, which is that once you go through something, you want to somehow like use it for some good right that you are not the only one. I see

that all the time. I think it is the most human reaction that we can have to say I want to ease somebody else's suffering in a way that mine was or was not. That it's like that idea their cracks and everything. That's how the light gets in, right. And there's this concept of a therapeutic presence, meaning it's when you're with someone and their presence feels healing. That idea of a therapeutic presence is very important. It also has been shown recently in new emerging studies that it

has an actual role to play in healing. And even I in the past have talked a lot about the difference between healing and cure and how someone may never be cured because it might be an incurable disease, but they can be healed. The thing about this group effect, which is so fascinating, Nora, it's what you're saying, this idea that when we have a lived experience, a tragedy, something that really defines and shapes us and shapes our

story forever. It's like there's that clear delineation before and after, right like that one incident. As human beings, we are meaning seeking, purpose driven creatures. We need to make meaning and send out of difficult experiences. It's just an evolutionary trait that we have, and so that when we go through something difficult, and like you said, Nor at the start, you felt alone and isolated, and then you put out that obituary and all of these people started reaching out

to you. It helped to normalize and validate the experience, which somehow helped you feel less alone, more connected, and a greater sense of therapeutic presence all around you. You were also able to give that therapeutic presence to others, and that's that group effect. It is a true scientific and measurable effect. And you've all done something different as a result of this event. That's also important to say. You found meeting and purpose and created a whole career

as someone who offers their therapeutic presence to others. Thank you. And all I wanted to do was to make sure that people knew that they were not the only one and to validate the fact that life is hard for everybody in different ways. And that is all we want as people is you feel seen and heard, and if you don't, try to make somebody else feel that way, and it will, and it will, it will hopefully at some point, like reflect back to you, will come back

to you. When you talk about leaving and a living an active legacy, Eve, It's like what you do is you reflect back to people the things that you didn't have right in the moment, and you are also showing people what is possible. I was reading something yesterday about, you know, the privilege of vulnerability, right, this idea that a lot of times it's hard to be vulnerable if you aren't in a place of privilege where you may not feel like you have that supportive community or even

a supportive job. So there is a privilege in vulnerability. But you know, when you use those redemptive experiences of vulnerability, I wonder by doing something with it if we're if that's part of an act of legacy. Other people don't may not have that ability to use their voice for that type of vulnerability. And how can I create that community or a world where everybody is entitled to that

type of imagination, surprise, compassion. You know, we we this This first season has been about understanding that time is not infinite, that time is diamonds, that we get one life. It may be interrupted abruptly, or as you said, if

we're lucky, we get more time on this earth. But it's just one life, and this episode we wanted to end the season on it because we believe this idea of an act of legacy is living on this earth with intention, which is the exact opposite of what you said when we started, which was this idea of living life without really thinking about the decisions were necessarily making,

living on a treadmill, auto pilot, not paying attention. So for us to understand time, we thought you could help us wrap up the season by this recognition that maybe all of us won't have a wake up moment, a light bulb moment. So what can you say to those people out there who didn't have, you know, an experience like you had obviously, but do you want to learn from what you did? What can they do and put into practice? To live a life where time has really looked at the way it should be is our most

valuable currency. I do think sometimes that that realization or that acknowledgement to live constantly with the sense of a ticking clock is also not healthy. Right If every a you wake up and think this could be it like that is that is no way to live. There is no way to live. But there's this Mason Jennings song that I listened to you over and over when Aaron was first diagnosed, called be here Now, And those are basically the lyrics, right like be here now, no other

place will do. And I got the word now tattooed on the inside of my wrist to remind me of the value of the present moments. And that does not mean that we have to love every moment. It does not mean that you have to go yolo. Our time does not need to be spent in big, splashy ways constantly. The biggest moments are typically going to be the smallest moments.

When I am eighty five years old, I want to remember the feeling of my youngest child sitting in the mom chair, which is what he calls, my body on the couch, and he holds my arm and he puts my hand across his heart and it covers almost his whole chest. Like that is that is everything, And that is such a small, small thing. We have so little control over our legacy, active or not. We do not know how our interactions ow our investments in time or money will pay off. We don't know those those those

seeds will be sown long after we are gone. In so many ways. And what I remember about Aaron is I don't want to remember just that he died, or the fact that he died. Like what I remember is that he spent an entire year memorizing all of his friends middle names and birthdays, because he said, to be a good friend, you had to know somebody's middle name

and their birthday. That is living in active legacy is being so present, as present as possible with the people you love, with the things that are important to you. And I know that we don't always have control over that, but if you do, even for a minute, that's worthwhile too. In mindfulness circles, we talk a lot about that idea of the timelessness of the present moment, and a mindfulness teacher once said to me, and look around all of

these intense stories that people are sharing. Recognize that every single person that you meet on the street lives with that same intensity in their lives that you do. Very simple statement. It rocked me, shocked me had never thought about that. We all go through life thinking we're leading this intense experience, which we are, but so is everyone else. And your story of this traumatic event which ultimately lead to a beautiful unfolding of you as you're really recognizing

your true self seems to me. But you had to go through that really intense experience, and because you went through that intensity, you are able to connect with others who have been through that same intensity, and so you exude empathy to me. And I can't thank you enough for your vulnerability and your sharing and your perspective. Thank you, guys, Hi,

it's me Eve. I wrote find your Unicorn Space as a permission slip for you to reconnect and discover that thing that makes you come alive without the guilt, without the excuses. Especially in our all too busy world, making time for ourselves is essential work. It improves our health, our relationships, and it just might be the antidote to burnout. Join me on a journey to find your Unicorn Space. Visit unicorn space dot com. Did I can't believe that

we're at our last episode of the season. Unbelievable. I know, I'm pretty reflective just given how much knowledge I feel like we got to glean from our really amazing variety of guests. It's definitely been a journey. So part of that journey, I think, is really this idea of how do we want to commit to continuing this journey, this active legacy. What sets you apart makes you apart. So as we think about what sets you apart and what makes you apart, it's great to have a map and

and we like to call that the creativity commitment. It's a way forward. It's definitely focuses on what sets you apart, but it also ends on what makes you apart. And so A d D I thought, if you would please model this creativity commitment, we can check in on you in season two, but also our listeners can follow along with us at page two O nine and find your unicorn space. So here it is. My name is at Dating a root car. My motivating values include joy, helpfulness,

and inspiration. I love it today and moving forward. I give myself permission to live by my values. I allow my values to inform my day to day curiosities, some of which are public health, mental health, stress, resilience, bettering the world through my knowledge, wanting to connect with other people. I am committed to explore deeper and pursue activities and

interests that are in alignment with my values. What you just said, I planned to take my open pursuit as far as this one is, think a big, hairy, audacious, authentic goal. You know, at the start of the pandemic, I was a doctor seeing patients talking about stress management. It was a stressful time because modern life is stressful. The pandemic happened and it turned everything on its head. Prior to seeing patients and being a doctor, I worked in global public health in Geneva with the w h

O Collaborating Center on refugee health, HIV and AIDS. I never thought that infectious disease and that whole world would ever align or combine with my work and stress management.

And here we are the pandemic. So in thinking about how I want to serve the world and be bigger and have a bigger impact, but also more aligned with my values, it would be when you ask me that question, I would say, I want to go all the way, whatever that may be in terms of helping with health, communication, for public health, COVID, mental health, refugee health, stress, resilience, all of it, because we are living in a unprecedented time.

And like you have always said, I love when you say that you met the moment with fair play, and I am ready to meet the moment with my expertise. Now, wow, I love that so much because when anybody thinks about stress, resilience, burnout and it's implication on the physical body or the brain, I want them to thank dr Adity neuro car. So

that's our big, hairy, audacious, authentic goal for you. My first actionable, small step forward toward leveling up and reaching my goal is committing to fostering my communication practice every single day, whether that means writing a few pages in my upcoming book or doing a TV interview, something every day that moves the needle for me. I love that so much. A communication practice. I mean, you're a woman

after my own heart. As you know my date for completing Well, you just said the date is every day, So I'm gonna let you get off on that one. My type of share that most resonates with me is and what I mean by that is why when you think about why you share yourself with the world, what are some of the motivations for why you want to share yourself with the world. I've never been motivated by money or fame. What I have always been motivated by is connection. I went into medicine for the power of

the human story. I love that moment in clinic when you explain something complex to a patient and they have that lightbulb aha moment. I love that same thing when people respond, whether through email or d M s, saying you explain something or you had some insight on mental health or public health. It's those ah ha moments that I live for. I love them because it tells me that people are thinking differently, and that is so meaningful. Connection.

You're sharing to connect and to pass on what you know in very complicated ways and the community I intend to connect with. Speaking of connection along my journey is and what I mean by that is who who are your spiritual friends? Who keeps you going towards this big vision of a doctor a DD neural car Media World Domination LLC becomes I think women like you Eve and other women like so many of the guests that we've had this season, people who are standing in their power,

living their truth and owning their authentic selves. What's been fascinating about this conversation with Nora Eve is that she has committed to this creative pursuit, a life of impact. She didn't go to some mountaintop or some fancy spa and a retreat and then have these aha moments. Life handed her a deck of cards and she played them

the best that she could. And I think for all of us, whether we've had a traumatic experience like Nora or otherwise, we have the hand that life dealt us and we have to play it to the best of our ability. To me, is a true commitment that we

all should actively pursue as our active legacy. I love that so much, Adity, because at the end of the day, this commitment to live creatively does not mean that you're going to be living in a studio with no rain on you and perfect birds chirping outside and the most beautiful canvas in front of you. That's just not the

way life works. But creativity is taking those values, it's taking your experiences, and what you say to yourself is that I'm going to live that active legacy by living those values, by moving forward in those values and really big ways possibly, but also by taking really really small steps. And everybody out there, you know this is not an

easy exercise. We build to it over two hundred pages and find your unicorn space, but it's an important on because this is a vision board, this is a commitment. This is a way forward in a journey. This is how we can think about what sets us apart but also what makes us apart, and being intentional in this part of our lives is an investment that we can't afford not to make at this stage, after the biggest disruption of our global lives. We have to commit to

making these changes and being apart to become apart. So in our last time out of the season, what we want you to do is make a creativity commitment. You can find it on page two O nine to find your Unicorn space or at fair play life dot com. We'll be back next season to dive into more topics like this and especially unicorn space, finding it, showcasing it, celebrating it, dancing in the rain together. Thank you all

for listening to this first season. Please share the show with your friends, tell us what you liked, what you learned, what you want to hear next, who you'd like for us to feature as a guest, and we'll be back soon. Thank you for listening to Time Out, a production of I Heeart Podcasts and Hello Sunshine. I'm Eve Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller fair Play and find your Unicorn Space. Follow me on social media at ev rodsky and learn more about our work at fair Play Life.

And I'm dr Addi Nearucar, a Harvard physician with a specialty and stress resilience, burnout, and mental health. Follow me on social media at dr add ne Rucar and find out more about my work at dr dd dot com. That's d r A d I t I dot com. Our Hello Sunshine team is Amanda Farrend, Aaron Stover, and Jennifer Yonker. Our I Heart Media team is Allie Perry, Jennifer Bassett, and Jessica Crnschi. We hope you all love

taking a much needed time out with us today. Listen and subscribe to Time Out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.