July 22, 2025 • 59 mins
What prepares someone to survive the unthinkable? For renowned polar explorer Eric Larsen, it wasn’t hope or heroism—it was hardship. From the punishing silence of the Arctic to the staggering indifference of a cancer diagnosis, Eric’s life has been shaped by brutal extremes.
In this profound episode of Alive Again, Eric shares how the mindset forged in the most hostile places on Earth—enduring one step at a time, reframing suffering as growth, and confronting fear without flinching—became his unexpected survival guide through cancer.
With striking honesty and humility, Eric reflects on how the same resilience that drove him across frozen continents helped him face mortality, and how—despite the emptiness he encountered—he discovered something deeply human: that compassion is the connective tissue between life and death.
This is not just a survival story. It’s a testament to the human spirit, a meditation on suffering, and a powerful reminder that even at the edge of the world, we are never truly alone.
Story Producer: Dan Bush
To learn more about Eric and his work, go to ericlarsenexplore.com
* If you have a transformative near-death experience to share, we’d love to hear your story. Please email us at aliveagainproject@gmail.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
My name is Eric Larson. I'm a poor adventure and
expedition guide, and in January of twenty twenty one, while
preparing for another expedition, I was diagnosed with stage four
colorectal cancer. I've come to appreciate the process more than
(00:36):
the outcome. In one sense, I parse down a lot
of the world in these really simple phrases. Training hard,
travel easy. The best way to be successful is not
have another choice, and so in one sense, the simple
story is also the good story. But with our culture
and how we view death, we miss the journey.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were
forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
accounts of near death experiences and, more broadly, brushes with death.
Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories
(01:24):
to remind us all of our shared human condition. Please
keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering
for some listener. Discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
It's really hard to separate my personal life and my
professional life. I think for me, I have always been
obsessed with the outdoors and honestly just camping. It's a
pretty simple passion that I have, and it's been that
(02:00):
singular focus that has really guided my life. I was
born in Wisconsin, a kind of a smallish town, white Bread,
you know, all the same kind of smaller farm town
outside of Milwaukee's. My dad was the director of a
nature center, and so you know, I spent a lot
(02:24):
of my childhood doing things that other people didn't do,
which is like going out and collecting prairie seeds and
banning birds and making maple syrup and identifying plants, and
you know, that was the focus of our house. I
just love being outside. I mean, you know, back in
the day, we were just off and doing stuff.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
Nobody was looking out for us.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Very quickly, I got into biking, which I think for
me was my ability to just get out of my spot.
I got a paper out and saved up a bunch
of money about my first bike when I was thirteen,
and then my world just expanded. I would take a
map and I would go ride sixty eighty one hundred
(03:11):
miles around I mean, I wasn't calling adventures. I was
just riding my bike, and I know very specifically, my
mom always wanted me to tell her where I was.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Going, and I would write her.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Incorrect directions to where I was going because I didn't
want anybody to know, and I just wanted to be
out on my own, and so I just loved that freedom.
I've been doing adventures and expeditions for over twenty five
(03:47):
years now, and it's been a slow rollout. I started
out as a dog musher, just kind of fell into
a job. I was a whitewater guide previously a backcountry
ranger prior to that, but I'd always been fascinating by
polar expeditions and I just put myself in a situation
and got a little lucky where I started working on
(04:07):
bigger polar style expeditions. In two thousand and six, my
partner and I completed the first ever summer.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Expedition to the North Pole.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
In twenty ten, I completed a unique world record journey
to the South Pole North Pole on top of Mount Everest,
all in one year. In twenty fourteen, I completed realistically
will be the last ever North Pole expedition from land,
you know, the Arctic Ocean, just itself is the front
lines of climate change, and that's where the most dramatic
(04:38):
changes are occurring. In twenty eighteen, I tried to do
a speed record to the South Pole. That was a failure.
I didn't do it, so but I you know, I've
been a failure many times over. It's a bummer, but
that's the nature of doing difficult things. But ultimately those
(05:00):
are all just steps along a bigger path.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
There's a Thomas Edison quote.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
He's like, I didn't fail, I just found ten thousand
ways it didn't work.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
That's the nature of life.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
I mean, my kind of philosophy, especially after getting sick,
is the obstacle is the path. You know. It's like
the good times are the exception. There's a lot to
life that just is enduring. There's a little bit of
(05:34):
an arrogance that goes into these things, and part of
it is based on your skills and knowledge and your preparation,
but there's also just kind of this idea that you're
in control and you've planned appropriately and so therefore nothing's
going to happen. And that being said, there's a lot
of uncertainty. So I think, you know, one of the
(05:56):
biggest things. For me was just moving towards an objective
and an uncertain conditions and uncertain terrain over an uncertain
time frame. It's hard to really understand what that's like.
You know, there's the physical danger of falling through the
ice and having a polar bearer jump on your tent,
(06:17):
and that's scary, but it's a moment and if you
get through it, it passes, you know, you know, a
big siraq collapsing on everest and all the you know,
you know, you see the cloud of stuff coming in
and hiding behind a sirac and having all the the
spin drift kind of circle around you. Like, those are
(06:38):
scary moments, but they're so finite, and as you move
through them, you get better at dealing with them. You
get a little bit of gallows humor, you know, like,
oh that was close. I think the harder part is
living in this uncertainty where you don't know what to expect.
So I said, you know, back into the thousand and
(07:00):
six we were doing a North Pole expedition. The summer hadn't
been done. We developed a special canoe slad that nobody'd
ever used before. We couldn't just call somebody up and say, hey, like,
what's it going to be like around this time? Coupled
with that, we were in a situation where we couldn't
get rescued, So for about half of the trip thirty
(07:22):
days or so, we were just in a zone where
it didn't matter what happened, we were there. To me,
that's much more stressful than any of those other specific
moments because you're never able to kind of come down
from that hyper vigilance, fear, or whatever it is. I
(07:47):
have a lot of mantras and phrases, mostly because I
consider myself the weakest link in anything I do, so
I try to buttress myself and make myself stronger one
of those, and I I really feel this is the
best way to be successful.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Is to not have another choice.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
And so I think with a lot of my expeditions
and adventures, what I learned early on is if you
are focused on achieving a difficult goal, whatever that is,
if you put yourself in a situation where there is
no way out it's sink or swim, you know you're
(08:27):
going to find a way to be successful. It's kind
of like the whole burning the ships thing. You know
there's no way back, the only way is forward, and
so when you do that, you you know you find
a way. It's not easy, it's challenging, it's emotionally taxing
and physically difficult, but at the end of the day,
(08:51):
there's a path and you're in a situation where you
have to figure it out and you do or you die.
Before I got sick, it was an interesting time for me.
(09:13):
I was in a weird philosophical space where in one hand,
I was trying to push as hard and as fast
as I could. And you know, for all intents and purposes,
I could have been on expeditions or adventures probably nine
months out of the year if I wanted to, which
is a dream come true. But simultaneously, I wanted to
(09:36):
be home and you know, coach soccer and put the
kids asleep and do all these things that a partner
and a.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Dad should do.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
We had been in COVID, and for me, COVID was
a bit of a relief because it was the first
time in five years that I had been around for
my daughter's birthday. You know, I'm usually guiding North Pole
expeditions at that time. Prior to COVID, I was on
a little bit of a tear in the sense that
(10:11):
I had been doing expeditions long enough where I had
some big objectives that I still wanted to do. I
was still taking like home equity loans out to go
to an art again stuff, so it's not like people
are just handing you cash, so there's a lot of risk.
I was also a little bit chasing my tail or
(10:33):
maybe just chasing everybody else, in the sense that you know,
if you're not moving, you're irrelevant, and you know, this
is my career, this is how I support my family,
and if I'm not doing things that are at the
leading edge, it's a dangerous loop to be in because
you just start pushing to do things for not necessarily
(10:57):
the process but the outcome. I was still in the
process of trying to be the best at what I
do in the world. I didn't want to be number two,
and I also realized that my job is very physical.
I was getting older, and I had a finite amount
(11:18):
of time to really be pushing that leading edge. At
the same time, the thing that I had been focused
on for my entire life, singularly to the fault of
everything else in my life, even my family.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
Was becoming less important.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
To me doing expeditions, this passion that I had since
I was a kid didn't seem as valuable in comparison
to being around for my kids and being a good
dad and a partner. But you know, as a self
employed person, when you stop moving, the money stops coming in,
(12:00):
and so there's also a lot of stress associated with
that for me, you know, like a as a guide
and somebody who's traveling and travel.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
Shuts down, like there's your whole income.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
So as the world starts opening up and I have
some clients to go do my polar training, I'm kind
of psyched just to be working. I was kind of
packing up getting ready to go lead a polar training
course in the beginning of January, and three days before
I left, I got a colonoscopy because I hadn't been
(12:36):
feeling great. And when I woke up from the colonoscopy,
my wife was sitting in the room with me, which
I thought was weird because it was COVID and the
doctor's like, you're not going anywhere. You know, in hindsight,
it's very clear to me now, but at the time
(12:57):
it's a little like the frog in the water going
up a degree, not really knowing that the water is
going to start boiling pretty soon. But in July of
twenty twenty, I broke my collar bone. It was this
kind of a silly mountain biking accident, got a concussion,
had surgery, and for about the next month, I just
was like, Okay, I'm going to start feeling better any
(13:19):
day now.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
And I just never felt better.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
And I started losing weight and my you know, and
prior to that, I had had some digestive issues, and
but I you know, it's I'm coming and going, I'm
doing hard things. I'm having you know, on expeditions, We're
just eating is not like the healthiest of menu is
reading a lot of fat and sugar just for the
calorie sake and the weight saving sake, you know. Just
(13:47):
that whole fall of twenty twenty, I was just like, man,
something just doesn't seem right with me. This isn't normal,
like people recover from this in a normal way. And
I still don't feel great. And that's where I was like, Huh,
maybe there's a bigger issue here. When I look back now,
I was probably having issues for years and just didn't
(14:09):
think much about it. I was forty nine at the time,
and I was like, oh, I should probably get a colonoscopy.
It just seems like my cousin had been diagnosed with
coal rectal cancer. I was having these digestive issues. Honestly,
I thought maybe I had Parkinson's disease. My dad had
Parkinson's disease and one of the symptoms is, you know,
digestive problems.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
And I just didn't know. I just felt like I.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Was coming off the rails and I just couldn't really
put my finger on it. And it was I didn't
have I didn't have a doctor. I had to go
get a doctor's appointment just to get the referral to
go get the colonoscopy, you know. And at the time,
the recommendation was fifty years old, and the and the
doctor was like, well, you're not fifty yet. I'm like,
(14:53):
I know I'm not, but still I just don't feel right.
So I had to kind of convince him a little bit,
which is crazy. And when I wake up Maria and
my wife was in the room sitting right next to me,
I kind of knew.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
I knew, you know.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
The doctor came up, you have cancer. And I wasn't surprised.
I knew something was messed up with me. But my
first thought was, man, I got all these responsibilities. I
have to go leave for a trip in three days.
And the doctor he said, you're not going anywhere. You
have to have surgery. You know, right now, it's it's bad.
(15:40):
You know, you're just trying to keep it together. This
is the whole I was just staring down at my shoelaces. Luckily,
my wife Maria was with me, and you know, she
just rises of the challenge in a time of crisis,
and so she was on top of everything. And I
have so much empathy for people that have to go
through this totally alone. It's crazy because as again as
(16:05):
a healthy person, you're just not in this world, and
so everything's so new and for every situation.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
There's positively negative.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
And when you're dealing with the modern medical system, you know,
it's pretty easy to say this doesn't work, this doesn't work,
that doesn't work. For a large part, I agree with
a lot of that, but then there's also all these
systems and infrastructure that just works so flawlessly. So as
soon as you get into this system, okay, you know,
like you're on a path and and you come into
(16:35):
a fork, and the fork on the left is no cancer,
and the fork on the right is cancer. And so
then you're on the cancer path. And then there's all
this infrastructure and system designed to help you get through that.
But it's just it's like pouring a bucket of water
over your head because it's just thrown at you from nothing.
(16:58):
He could see that a very large tumor in my
colon and rectum, but they don't know where it is
and the rest of my body. So then maybe the
next day it's come down and get scans and then
they say, okay, well this many lymphnodes are impacted and
you have these spots in your lungs and so you're
(17:19):
going from zero to one thousand.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
In a very short time.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Do you just kind of start going down this path
of getting more information and processing that information? And it's crazy.
I'm an optimist. I mean I am. The glass is
not half full, but it's overflowing.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
You know.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
I don't really focus on negative things, but you know,
I think it's just like what do we believe? What's
our life view? I you know, if there's one thing
that Polar Expeditions tea, it's you're staggering insignificance in the world.
(18:05):
I mean, you're locked in this epic battle of survival
for days and weeks and months, and it's all consuming
it morning, noon and night, and your sleep and your dreams,
and at the end of the day, it's just this
arbitrary thing that you're doing. The rest of the world
is turning without you. People are waking up and going
(18:28):
to sleep, dying, fighting wars, fall in love, whatever it is,
and other people may find religion in those moments. You know,
my perspective is unique to me, and what I found
was just this insignificance, you know, and just arbitrary nature
(18:49):
of life. I very much realize that I'm not the
most important part of the system. It's a perspective that
I don't think a lot of people have overall, at
(19:10):
least I haven't run into people that have that, because
we always want to be the star in our own
movie and feel important. But when you just start looking
at the nature of life and the amount of people
who have been around and have been forgotten completely, and
the universe and time in general, it's just hard to
(19:35):
think that I'm important in any of that. You know,
I also am dealing with difficult environments where I'm not
in control of a lot of things, and there's an
arrogance in a lot of our perspectives in life. We're
(20:00):
in control. We can do this, And so when you
ask me, like am I going to fight this? I
never once had the mentality of like I'm gonna be cancer.
I never thought that. And now I'm not belittling that mindset,
because I think your mind can be a great asset
(20:22):
to you in difficult situations.
Speaker 3 (20:26):
It can also be the opposite.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
But for me, when I was diagnosed as initially stage four,
everybody knows enough about cancer and know that stage four
cancer isn't good, and you see the end. You know,
I went into the doctor and the doctor said, Okay,
(20:51):
you're stage four, you're in palliative care. Sign this piece
of paper that says you're impalliative care. And that's a
that's like signing your death certificate. Basically from my perspective
in that moment, I wasn't thinking about like, oh, I'm
the most badass dude who's going to beat this. I'm
(21:13):
thinking how can I get one more day with my kids?
And you know, colorectal cancer, you've got you know, four
years it's science, you know, like there's the percentages, and
I'm just thinking, Okay, what age will my kids be
(21:35):
when I die? What will they remember of me? And
comparing that with like, Okay, when I was twelve, what
did I remember? What memories do I have? And so
my mindset wasn't about beating cancer or being tough. It
(22:02):
was just how can I get a couple more days.
I'm not totally in control of all this, you know.
One of the things I've learned from expeditions. One of
the many things that I kind of translated and not
necessarily in the moment, but maybe with hindsight, but like,
(22:25):
hope is a dangerous thing. Like hope can be awesome,
like it can sustain you, Like I hope this happens.
But if if you're broke and you hope you're going
to win the lottery and you're you know, the chances
are so slim and when it never happens, man, that's
the hardest realization. And on expeditions, like when we kept
(22:49):
when I tried to hope for improving conditions.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
And something and.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
A break to come our way and then that doesn't happen.
The despair and downfall that you feel in those moments
is debilitating and so translating that idea to be a
diagnosi with stage four cancer. What I wanted to do
(23:14):
was just put myself in a situation where I could
just be around the things that were most important to me,
which was my family. And so prior to all this,
(23:38):
you know, I was chasing my tail a little bit.
I was trying to be this thing that I had
always wanted to be and reached a level of success,
but then found this other thing, which was being a
dad that I never really thought about. I mean, my
son was born, was a forty one, so I had
a whole adult life of epic shit and craziness, and
(24:06):
you know, kind of got blindsided about how important that
was to me. You know, when I got diagnosed was
simultaneously at this point in my life where I was like,
hey man, this thing that I'm doing doesn't seem as
important to me anymore, and maybe my greatest gift to
society is just being a good dad. You know, I
(24:31):
wouldn't say I was searching in my life, but you know,
the word exploration kind of implies that to find something
so meaningful in a way that you weren't looking for
(24:51):
just makes it all the more meaningful. Stage four cancer
is the worst thing you could hear, but it's also
the nature of the world, and I could have been
killed multiple times in a variety of ways. It's just,
you know, what's the direction we're all going where none
(25:15):
of us are getting out of it alive.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
And part of.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
The beauty of it is for a big chunk of
your life, you don't think about it, and time as
your friend, and you have unlimited time and it's not
part of your perspective.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
It's also the tragedy of it too, because.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
You don't think about it and you don't understand how
fragile everything is. Kind of the beauty and terrible aspect
of life all rolled into one. I think with expeditions
you become very focused on time. I mean, we run
(25:58):
every day on a very strict schedule, but we're also
dealing with time in a way that we don't do
in our normal lives. We're doing one singular thing without
a lot of variation. For you know, like I said, days,
weeks and months. That's just not how the rest of
(26:21):
our world works. We have so many variables. We're doing this,
we're here, We're there. You know, like every second is
action packed, and when somebody doesn't text you back in
five seconds, you think they are dead. You know, that's
how our world works. And so when you put yourself
in a situation where time moves on a different scale,
(26:42):
you kind of start to see all this stuff. And
I've always said, like, the best way to understand what's
important is you remove everything in your life. And that's
kind of what you do on an expedition, is you
put yourself in a situation where you remove all the
comfort inconvenience. In our culture, you know, we're not exposed
(27:11):
to death and dying. It's not part of our communications,
it's not part of our understanding of life. Yet it's
the thing that defines us all and in the US,
specifically in Western culture, I can't necessarily totally comment on,
but I think.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
In the US specifically, we just we push it aside.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
We focus on these successes in this human achievement. And again,
I think for me, through polar expeditions and through expeditions
in general, I've just seen another side.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
Of that.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
How temporary things are, as well as how insignificant one
person is. You know, I also believe that human beings
are designed to survive death, not in the person who dies,
(28:12):
but the person who knows the person who dies. Like,
we've all been in contact with death in some way,
and we get through it.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
We live our lives.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Partners lose spouses, kids lose parents, parents lose kids, friends
lose friends, and we move on. It's hard, it's difficult,
but we do it. I had an expedition partner that
killed himself a couple of years ago. When I was
listening in on the service, Darcy was his name, so
(28:48):
I say his name so that.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
I can remember.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
But you know, whoever was organizing it or the facilitator
was like, we're not here to litigate what happened and why.
Like it's but you get the time.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
You get, and let's just celebrate that fact.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
And you know, that really resonated with me. And I
think that that control is more of an illusion than anything.
In one sense, I parse down a lot of the
world in these really simple phrases. Training hard, travel easy,
(29:38):
Let's go up there and see what happens. Begin with
one step. The best way to be successful is not
have another choice. I find that those sound bites are
empowering and connective and so in one sense, the simple
story is also the good story, you know, or the
valuable one. But we miss the journey and all the
(30:06):
effort that goes into every waky moment. You know, even
just waking up in your bed and making breakfast is
like climbing Mount Everest for some people, you know, but
for better or worse. I feel like I've been lucky
because I am.
Speaker 4 (30:24):
Involved in one of the most arbitrary sports in the world,
where every day is the same and the end looks
just like the beginning in the middle, and so by.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Default I've come to appreciate the process more than the outcome.
There's a lot of stuff that goes on in between
the major talking points.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
When I got.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Sick, what I realized is all that time I spent
engaged in these completely arbitrary endeavors actually had a lot
of utility, whether it's risk tolerance. Like I am, I'm
in uncertain situations all the time, and so that's what
a medical a bad medical condition like cancer is. You're
(31:09):
just living in uncertainty and there's a lot of fear,
and so you deal with fear as well. You learn
how to compartmentalize fear, not necessarily push it away, but
just understand what it is. What we do on expeditions
is we have this routine, we have this schedule. We
take this big problem and we break it up into
these manageable pieces. And you know, if you think about
(31:32):
like chemo, like that's a big hole process over many
months that you just don't know how your body's going
to respond or your mind, and so, you know, I
never once thought about, oh, you know, I'm going to
be done pretty soon. I'm just like, Okay, you know,
we've got twelve weeks here. I'm just going to get
(31:53):
through this week and then we're going to get to
the next week, and then we'll go halfway. And even
then it was like, okay, now I've got radiation.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
I didn't allow.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
Myself to think about any of these next steps because
it's just so overwhelming. You can't deal with that. And
so you just kind of break the big problem up
into into the manual pieces, and that mindset.
Speaker 3 (32:13):
I think helps out a lot. I also think I.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Just think people have a lot of resilience, you know,
but we're not we don't we're not tested on a
given day about what we can overcome. If you just
kind of start moving forward, there's going to be a
path because there is this kind of resilience that we
all have that I don't think we're all aware of.
(32:38):
We're resilient beings, but we just don't. We don't know
that because we've we're a little more coddled now. When
you're engaged with kind of physically and mentally challenging things
that are overwhelming on a daily basis for years, it
(33:00):
just becomes kind of second nature. You're like, oh, okay,
here we are in another shitty situation with an uncertain outcome,
with the world going by without me. You know, that's Tuesday, Okay.
I can name instances where certain things happened. I went
(33:22):
to the doctor and I got diagnosed. I had to
sign a piece of paper that says I'm impallative care.
I had to go get a lung biopsy. Those are
significant moments. But did I become a completely different person
and forget all of the past. Definitely not. My body's
(33:43):
messed up. Yeah, I'm not the same person that I
was before I got diagnosed. I had fourteen inches of
my coal and taken out. I can't go to the
bathroom in the same way every day. I have to
get myself an animis. It's a pain in the ass
literally and figuratively. My life is forever change. But when
I think about it, I don't know if I would
(34:03):
not have gone through that experience and all that pain
and suffering and fear and everything. Like I just I
just feel it's made me a better person. Am I
a great person? Definitely not, you know, like there's still
room for improvement. Was I a jerk before? No, it's
(34:26):
just kind of another thing on this process. I will
say it's informed my life in ways that maybe other
things haven't because.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
It was so all encompassing. You know.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
There was now one moment where I was waking up
and like, oh, this is a care free Tuesday, What
am I going to do today? I go, you know, No,
it was like, you know, laying in bed with a
chemo pump hooked up to my port, trying not to puke,
listening to Maria and the kids eating dinner downstairs, thinking about, Oh,
this is what my house would.
Speaker 3 (35:00):
Be like without me in it.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
But you know, I think my biggest takeaway is just
this idea of compassion and how much value that has
and the compassion that was shown to me in some
of my weakest moments, you know, when you're.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
Just your most fragile.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
And someone goes out of their way.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
To make that moment.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
Better in whatever way, whatever small way. They might even
not be thinking about it. I mean I was when
I got my scans and whatever and stage four you
got four years to live. I got connected with a
really good doctor and he's like, hey, man, you might
want to check out those lungs. It might not be,
can't It looks like cancer probably is, but.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
It might not be.
Speaker 5 (36:07):
And so I I don't know how I did this,
but I was so focused on not interrupting my kid's life.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
I didn't want him to have my sickness be the
defining thing in their lives, you know. I didn't. And
I don't know if that's good or bad. It was
just what my mindset was. I didn't want to impact
them and take away from their joy of being kids
and have this dark cloud hanging over everything. So I
(36:44):
drove myself to Denver. Buddy took me to the hospital
in the morning, and I was laying there on the
bed getting all hooked up, and I just started thinking
about this procedure they were going to go in through
the side of my chest and go into my life ung,
deflate my lung, pull out some of this tissue, and
(37:05):
see if it's cancerous or not.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
And we had been on a roller coaster prior to that.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
You know, you get one piece of news that's good,
and you get another piece of news bad. It's just insane,
and so I was very both skeptical and just totally scared.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
I mean, I was so scared.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
I just was laying in bed alone and I just
started thinking about, like, what's the outcome of this procedure.
I was so scared. And they were wheeling me in
and I just started bawling, and I was crying so hard.
You're just so out of control, you know, like you
just you're a piece of meat, you know, just living
(37:47):
inside your own head. And there's all these perce you know,
like like I said, there's all these procedures and blah
blah blah. And and they lifted me up on this table.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
I was just so scared.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
But this nurse she just reached up and she just
took my hand and it was just you know, I
spent a lot of time alone and on my own,
and I'm pretty independent. I didn't really have an affectionate family.
(38:21):
It's not part of my psyche, but that little gesture
of just like hey man, I get it. It's fucking scary.
Speaker 6 (38:33):
That kindness has really informed my life, and like to
take that away would mean that I wouldn't have had cancer,
you know, but then I wouldn't also just deeply understand that.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
I always say that.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
I'm someone that learns lessons the hard way. I think
a lot of people probably know that just in their lives,
and for me, I feel like, you know, the best
way I learned is through the failures and the mistakes,
and so maybe it took this whole thing for me
to understand that role. And you know, when I look
back at my life and especially like in expeditions, you know,
(39:19):
when was the time that I was my best?
Speaker 3 (39:22):
You know? Was it when I.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
Was like, you got to be tougher? Not really, you know,
it was when I was giving somebody a hug.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
I just look at the world through that filter.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
Now again, I think what a lot of my life
is is kind of you know, I'm a slow learner.
I got to put myself in these difficult situations to
get the grains. But I think I'm a guy who
(39:57):
will wade through a mile of crap to get the
one positive thing. And this is where being an optimist
is helpful. Like I had to deal with the worst
experience of my life. Cancer is an atom bomb that
destroys everything that it touches.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
Our family, the challenges.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
That we all went through, our Maria and our relationship,
and how difficult that was at times in our darkest
of dark days. The intense pain of just everything, not
only the chemo, but the surgery and this terrible infection
I had after surgery. I couldn't sit in a chair
for five months. I was in so much pain I
could barely walk addicted to oxycodone. It was brutal. But
(40:42):
I don't think about any of those things on any
given day at all. And what I think about is
just that enhanced perspective of, you know, the role that
compassion plays, and understanding and giving somebody the benefit of
(41:03):
the doubt.
Speaker 3 (41:06):
Stick of work in me. I don't need anything else
after that.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
Welcome back to Alive again. Joining me for a conversation
about today's story. Are my other Alive against story producers
Nicholas Dakowski and print Day, and I'm your host Dan
Bush we usually have stories of people, you know, of
people who's near death experience or they're brush with death
like transformed them and informed like a new sense of
self and a new sense of purpose and meaning, and
(41:53):
like solidify their connection with the universe. But I, like
I was, I asked Eric to talk to me because
this or is the opposite of that. His experience of
suffering and putting himself in these extremely adverse, life threatening
conditions informed how he dealt with his battle with cancer.
Speaker 7 (42:12):
So I was very curious. I was like, well, how
did that inform your understanding or your you know, when
you were faced with stage four colorectal cancer.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
And what he said.
Speaker 7 (42:24):
Was shocking because I expected I expected Eric to say,
you know, it was all about attitude or some story
where his positivity, his optimism, his resilience, his sort of confidence.
You know, I expected him to tell about how he
you know, his internal monologu or his narrative was positive
(42:48):
and so therefore, you know, it gave him because he
hears stories about that people saying really positive during their
cancer their battles with cancer, and the ones that are
more positive tend to have better outcomes and so forth.
So I was thinking maybe that was what he would say,
but he's he didn't. He said, no, life is harsh.
You don't know what's coming.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
There is no.
Speaker 7 (43:08):
Certainty. You know, the universe is completely fucking indifferent and and.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Hope will kill you.
Speaker 7 (43:19):
I was just stunned by his Here again he's another
person who said he would he would not take back
his experience. He said, humans are innately resilient. We have
the capacity to endure pain and suffering and doubt.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
We just have that.
Speaker 7 (43:40):
And so his his whole philosophy is like we should
get we should just lean into suffering. We should just
become familiar with it. We should become comfortable with it,
because that's that's that's how we grow and that's part
of life.
Speaker 8 (43:49):
Oh, I mean, it's it's I think, I think something
that I walked away from, and it is he was.
It was just, uh, it was him talking about how
like go on these you know, thirty day expeditions, and
how it was the same thing and you just focused
on like the little thing that you had in front
(44:10):
of you that you did over and over and over
and over, day after day, minute by minute, and that
was what the way you get through it is by
kind of just focusing on what is immediately in front
of you and what you can deal with. And I
think that that was just something that that's just a
very good, a very good life lesson in general. And
(44:34):
it sounds like he applied that definitely to the cancer,
just dealing with the thing that's right in front of
you and just being hyper focused on that thing. And
that's how you that's how you survive, is by doing
the same little thing over and over and and I
think that that. I mean, Jesus, if that ain't a
(44:55):
metaphor for life, you know, I mean, like.
Speaker 9 (44:59):
Well, that's the same, that's the same thing that Anely's
Cochrane said in her story about the fires and Lahaina, Hawaii.
You know, she said that she just would think about
what was two feet in front of her. The story
about the Dave Meadows who just survived the tsunami in Thailand,
he was I could only think about what was thirty
(45:20):
feet in.
Speaker 3 (45:21):
Front of me.
Speaker 9 (45:22):
When Eric says, you know, you know, going on these
expeditions taught him not to think, to worry about, or
to put too much faith into in hope, because if
you put your faith in hope and you come around
the bend and that thing you're hoping for is not there.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
It just right totally destroys you.
Speaker 8 (45:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (45:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (45:42):
He talked a lot about breaking big problems into small steps,
and I found that that's not only for my lack
of executive functioning. If I look at the big picture,
I get overwhelmed and I literally have to make a
list and then I have to just kind of cover
everything up except the one thing at the top of
the list, and then I'm going across it off and
move to the next thing. I'm multitasking is not something
(46:03):
I'm capable of. I used to think I was.
Speaker 2 (46:05):
I'm terrible at it.
Speaker 8 (46:07):
I'm terrible at it. I still think that I'm killing
it most of the time.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
But I'm not.
Speaker 6 (46:12):
I'm not.
Speaker 9 (46:15):
This story was I mean, this story really spoke to me,
maybe more than a lot of the others. I just
the story really spoke to me, because you know, I
think those of us who picked difficult career fields, nobody
on this call trying to make it in. Trying to
make a career out of taking pictures and writing stories
(46:36):
and making videos and films is about like trying to
make a career out of climbing mountains, and you do
become very focused on man, if I could make this film,
or if I could get this client, or if I
could write this piece for this magazine, And that becomes
a way to define who you are.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
And it does become about your little notches that.
Speaker 9 (47:01):
You put on your belt rather than the process itself
of just living your life and being able to create.
And when he talked about COVID being a relief because
he was able to spend time with his daughter, I
just remember that myself. When COVID came, it was like,
I don't have to be on the hustle right now,
you know, I can give myself permission to be with
my family. And it's I think that's the thing I
(47:24):
took out of this story more than anything. Even if
you got four years to live because you have colorectal cancer,
those are moments you can really dial down and be
with your family and really be part of the process,
you know, rather than trying to check a box, you know,
trying to achieve something.
Speaker 7 (47:44):
There were really two takeaways that I think the story
you know gave to me, or that I walked away
with that idea that compassion is the connective tissue of
life and death. So like again, he didn't walk away
with this profound sense of God's unconditional love. He walked
(48:06):
away with this view of the staggering and difference of
the universe, but is isolated and cold as that sort
of indifference of the universe is. He said that there's
utility in it. It takes shape and our ability to
be compassionate, you know, it forces compassion and our understanding
(48:31):
towards one another, and that the loneliness and isolation in
time and space is necessary.
Speaker 3 (48:39):
For that compassion.
Speaker 7 (48:41):
It's the driving force of humanity and sort of what
interconnects us and keeps us. And it's an idea that
continues to a lot of these stories. People end up
with the same thing of the takeaway is reflected again
and again, where get myself Once I'm removed my ego
from the city suation which I Once I get out
of the the idea of myself and get beyond that,
(49:07):
then you're then they realize that that it's not about
sort of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and the self,
you know, the the resilience or sort of the the
self confidence that we all try to imbue upon our
kids of like, you know, self reliance. I guess I'm
trying to say that's valuable when there's nothing else absolutely
(49:32):
to keep you alive. But the more important element to
our experience is one of compassion and of helping each
other and of connectivity. And I think that that's that
was his takeaway. He's like, you know, I've spent my
life out here alone, in the wilderness and in the
in the frozen tundra, uh in the extremes conditions of
(49:58):
our planet. And and once he got cancer, he was like,
I just want to be with my kids. I just
want to spend time with those that I love and
that love me. And the other thing that I took
from his story is that, you know, it echoes other
stories too, that the idea that we this is not
that we're here to suffer, but that suffering, you know,
(50:20):
overcoming obstacles, challenges, trials, just like in the stories that
we write as filmmakers. It's not that we have to suffer,
but that growth. For growth to happen, suffering is necessary.
Speaker 2 (50:39):
Well.
Speaker 9 (50:39):
And I think that that drive to define yourself by
whatever your career path is, and however you define personal
excellence in that field I do think that's an important
drive to have at a young age, you know, And
I think it drives you into whether you achieve the
things that you set out to do or not. I mean,
I think it sets you on a path where you
(51:00):
do face those challenges, and I think that's important part
of growing. I remember I was watching the Olympics one
year and there was like a they were talking to
some middle aged athletes who had won a gold when
she was like eighteen or something, and she said, they
were like, do you miss the competition? She said, no,
I feel like accomplished what I said on this what
I said on this earth to do. And I thought, gosh,
(51:20):
wouldn't that be great at age eighteen, I feel like
you were You've accomplished what you set out to do.
But I think you're I just think you know, you're.
Your desires and needs definitely change as you get older.
I mean, the idea of accomplishing some of the things
that were really important to you when you're young. As
(51:41):
you get older, as you have your family, you know,
you start to realize they're not quite as pressing, you know.
Like I remember, I was never one who was like, oh,
I just need to have a family, and I need
to get married. And I remember when I did, just
looking at my wife and saying, you know, you're a
gift that I never asked for. I never I wanted
to have a film and sun dance, or I wanted
(52:01):
to publish a book or something, and those things didn't
happen for me. But I got this wife and it
was better than anything I could have imagined, you know.
And then now I have daughters, and it's like it's
what Eric describes, it's like, you know, he he accomplished
a lot of his professional goals, and he still felt
driven to do more and this slowed him down to
just enjoy the process. He enjoy and I family, He totally.
Speaker 7 (52:26):
He and I had a like when we first did
our initial call before the interview, he and I really
had a We really connected because he's fifty three years old.
He's the exact same age that I am, and he,
you know, we share a lot in common, you know,
as in terms of just where we are in life
(52:46):
and what's left of life. You know, there's a ticking
clock and what are you going to do with it?
Speaker 1 (52:50):
And he was just a very compassionate guy and very
relatable in fact, he invited me to go on one
of his Polar Expedition training courses. Like anyway, I just
I really, you know, when I was done talking to him,
I felt I felt like I found a friend. And
(53:14):
I just love that he's such a realist. He's not
walking away going I have figured out that there is
love in the universe, and that love is the texture
of the matrix of all things. And then when we
should not fear death and that you know, he walked
away with a very different kind of His ability to
survive cancer had to do with a very different, more practical,
(53:36):
more utilitarian sort of.
Speaker 7 (53:41):
Strategy. And it didn't make him suddenly see God, you know,
it just made him understand that whether you see God
or not, compassion is ultimately and connection or ultimately the
things that we really need to thrive.
Speaker 3 (54:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 8 (54:01):
I think a lot of these are a lot of
these are very uplifting. But I think the ones that
really kind of get me is when is the ones
where you're not offered proof of an afterlife, you're not
offered anything like that. You're basically just like go through
(54:22):
this and you recognize how close you were, and it's
just like you just kind of like go, uh, okay,
well I have to draw my own conclusions here. Nobody's
gonna like hand me this. Like there's not some white
light that I get to walk into and like no,
it's gonna be okay. It's like I just kind of
have to keep guessing and just just keep like moving
(54:46):
forward based on the information that I have in front
of me, put in a new context. And I think
that I think that's really interesting. I think there's there's
something like super I mean, it's fair, it's it's super huge.
It's just very human, you know, mm hmm, so absolutely.
Speaker 9 (55:08):
I just remember, like when I was younger, just thinking
of the idea of sitting at home with my family
and all the things you hear about the comment the
contentment of being with your family and middle age and
now I'm going to be with my I just remember
just thinking like how corny and contrite and how boring
that would be. And and I just you know, like
(55:29):
he talks about like if you're not you know, what
do you say, If you're not moving, you're irrelevant. If
you're not doing things in the leading edge, you're irrelevant.
Speaker 3 (55:37):
You know.
Speaker 9 (55:37):
Whether that was in his field, yeah, in his field
and in our field, and even in your social life
and going out and having fun, and you get to
a point where you're just like, you know, if I
don't go to another art party or see another band,
or have to pack my car with gear for a
shoot again, I'll be okay with that. I'm happy to
just sit with my family. And I remember the real
bridge was when I turned fifty, because I remember I
(55:57):
woke up that morning and logged into Facebook and somebody
was starting some kind of political argument or something, and
I was about to chime in, and I'm like.
Speaker 4 (56:05):
I'm fifty, I don't really I don't really care whatever.
Speaker 10 (56:10):
You know.
Speaker 9 (56:11):
I think that's when you start to wear the you know,
world's number one Grandpa hat, and you start to not
worry about what shoes you're you're wearing out. It's just
like you're just like, I'm content.
Speaker 7 (56:19):
It's interesting that it takes us that long to the
meturation rate is fifty years, to get to the point
where we don't care about external validation.
Speaker 2 (56:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 9 (56:30):
I remember reading an interview with like one of the
guys from a Clash and he said, you know, we
had the number one critically acclaimed album of the eighties,
and now I paint houses because I can't get a job.
And I was like, but you had the number one
critically acclaimed album of the eighties. I mean, that's what
life is for. And I'm like, if I had a
number one album critically acclaimed album of the eighties at
(56:51):
this point in my life, I'd be like, Okay, I
think I'd like to go paint.
Speaker 2 (56:54):
My house and maybe with my daughter.
Speaker 9 (56:55):
I really care about that.
Speaker 7 (56:57):
Like Nick said, being the kindness is more important than success.
Speaker 1 (57:04):
Next time, on a Live Again, we hear the story
of Rune Colbeck, who survived a bizarre encounter with a
serial killer in Anchorage, Alaska, and still grapples with the
psychological impact of the incident.
Speaker 10 (57:17):
The whole encounter, I mean, it just took seconds, but
it felt like it felt like an eternity. It was
playing out enough of that I kept being surprised that
I wasn't dead yet.
Speaker 1 (57:37):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent Die,
Nicholas Dakowski, and Lauren Vogelba music by Ben Lovett, Additional
music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick
and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional
production support. Our studio engineers are Rima el Kali and
(57:57):
Nums Griffin. Our editors are Dan Gerhart Slovichca, Brent Die
and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben love It and Alexander Rodriguez.
I'm your host, Dan Bush. Thanks to Eric Larson for
sharing his story. To learn more about Eric and his work,
go to Eric larsenexplore dot com. That's e r I
(58:18):
c l A r s e n e x p
l o r e dot com. Alive Again is a
production of i Art Radio and Psychopia Pictures. If you
have a transformative near death experience to share, we'd love
to hear your story. Please email us at Alive Again
Project at gmail dot com. That's a l I v
(58:40):
e A g A I N p r o j
e c t at gmail dot com. Four two
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
My name is Eric Larson. I'm a poor adventure and
expedition guide, and in January of twenty twenty one, while
preparing for another expedition, I was diagnosed with stage four
colorectal cancer. I've come to appreciate the process more than
(00:36):
the outcome. In one sense, I parse down a lot
of the world in these really simple phrases. Training hard,
travel easy. The best way to be successful is not
have another choice, and so in one sense, the simple
story is also the good story. But with our culture
and how we view death, we miss the journey.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were
forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
accounts of near death experiences and, more broadly, brushes with death.
Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories
(01:24):
to remind us all of our shared human condition. Please
keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering
for some listener. Discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
It's really hard to separate my personal life and my
professional life. I think for me, I have always been
obsessed with the outdoors and honestly just camping. It's a
pretty simple passion that I have, and it's been that
(02:00):
singular focus that has really guided my life. I was
born in Wisconsin, a kind of a smallish town, white Bread,
you know, all the same kind of smaller farm town
outside of Milwaukee's. My dad was the director of a
nature center, and so you know, I spent a lot
(02:24):
of my childhood doing things that other people didn't do,
which is like going out and collecting prairie seeds and
banning birds and making maple syrup and identifying plants, and
you know, that was the focus of our house. I
just love being outside. I mean, you know, back in
the day, we were just off and doing stuff.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
Nobody was looking out for us.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Very quickly, I got into biking, which I think for
me was my ability to just get out of my spot.
I got a paper out and saved up a bunch
of money about my first bike when I was thirteen,
and then my world just expanded. I would take a
map and I would go ride sixty eighty one hundred
(03:11):
miles around I mean, I wasn't calling adventures. I was
just riding my bike, and I know very specifically, my
mom always wanted me to tell her where I was.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Going, and I would write her.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Incorrect directions to where I was going because I didn't
want anybody to know, and I just wanted to be
out on my own, and so I just loved that freedom.
I've been doing adventures and expeditions for over twenty five
(03:47):
years now, and it's been a slow rollout. I started
out as a dog musher, just kind of fell into
a job. I was a whitewater guide previously a backcountry
ranger prior to that, but I'd always been fascinating by
polar expeditions and I just put myself in a situation
and got a little lucky where I started working on
(04:07):
bigger polar style expeditions. In two thousand and six, my
partner and I completed the first ever summer.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Expedition to the North Pole.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
In twenty ten, I completed a unique world record journey
to the South Pole North Pole on top of Mount Everest,
all in one year. In twenty fourteen, I completed realistically
will be the last ever North Pole expedition from land,
you know, the Arctic Ocean, just itself is the front
lines of climate change, and that's where the most dramatic
(04:38):
changes are occurring. In twenty eighteen, I tried to do
a speed record to the South Pole. That was a failure.
I didn't do it, so but I you know, I've
been a failure many times over. It's a bummer, but
that's the nature of doing difficult things. But ultimately those
(05:00):
are all just steps along a bigger path.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
There's a Thomas Edison quote.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
He's like, I didn't fail, I just found ten thousand
ways it didn't work.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
That's the nature of life.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
I mean, my kind of philosophy, especially after getting sick,
is the obstacle is the path. You know. It's like
the good times are the exception. There's a lot to
life that just is enduring. There's a little bit of
(05:34):
an arrogance that goes into these things, and part of
it is based on your skills and knowledge and your preparation,
but there's also just kind of this idea that you're
in control and you've planned appropriately and so therefore nothing's
going to happen. And that being said, there's a lot
of uncertainty. So I think, you know, one of the
(05:56):
biggest things. For me was just moving towards an objective
and an uncertain conditions and uncertain terrain over an uncertain
time frame. It's hard to really understand what that's like.
You know, there's the physical danger of falling through the
ice and having a polar bearer jump on your tent,
(06:17):
and that's scary, but it's a moment and if you
get through it, it passes, you know, you know, a
big siraq collapsing on everest and all the you know,
you know, you see the cloud of stuff coming in
and hiding behind a sirac and having all the the
spin drift kind of circle around you. Like, those are
(06:38):
scary moments, but they're so finite, and as you move
through them, you get better at dealing with them. You
get a little bit of gallows humor, you know, like,
oh that was close. I think the harder part is
living in this uncertainty where you don't know what to expect.
So I said, you know, back into the thousand and
(07:00):
six we were doing a North Pole expedition. The summer hadn't
been done. We developed a special canoe slad that nobody'd
ever used before. We couldn't just call somebody up and say, hey, like,
what's it going to be like around this time? Coupled
with that, we were in a situation where we couldn't
get rescued, So for about half of the trip thirty
(07:22):
days or so, we were just in a zone where
it didn't matter what happened, we were there. To me,
that's much more stressful than any of those other specific
moments because you're never able to kind of come down
from that hyper vigilance, fear, or whatever it is. I
(07:47):
have a lot of mantras and phrases, mostly because I
consider myself the weakest link in anything I do, so
I try to buttress myself and make myself stronger one
of those, and I I really feel this is the
best way to be successful.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Is to not have another choice.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
And so I think with a lot of my expeditions
and adventures, what I learned early on is if you
are focused on achieving a difficult goal, whatever that is,
if you put yourself in a situation where there is
no way out it's sink or swim, you know you're
(08:27):
going to find a way to be successful. It's kind
of like the whole burning the ships thing. You know
there's no way back, the only way is forward, and
so when you do that, you you know you find
a way. It's not easy, it's challenging, it's emotionally taxing
and physically difficult, but at the end of the day,
(08:51):
there's a path and you're in a situation where you
have to figure it out and you do or you die.
Before I got sick, it was an interesting time for me.
(09:13):
I was in a weird philosophical space where in one hand,
I was trying to push as hard and as fast
as I could. And you know, for all intents and purposes,
I could have been on expeditions or adventures probably nine
months out of the year if I wanted to, which
is a dream come true. But simultaneously, I wanted to
(09:36):
be home and you know, coach soccer and put the
kids asleep and do all these things that a partner
and a.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Dad should do.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
We had been in COVID, and for me, COVID was
a bit of a relief because it was the first
time in five years that I had been around for
my daughter's birthday. You know, I'm usually guiding North Pole
expeditions at that time. Prior to COVID, I was on
a little bit of a tear in the sense that
(10:11):
I had been doing expeditions long enough where I had
some big objectives that I still wanted to do. I
was still taking like home equity loans out to go
to an art again stuff, so it's not like people
are just handing you cash, so there's a lot of risk.
I was also a little bit chasing my tail or
(10:33):
maybe just chasing everybody else, in the sense that you know,
if you're not moving, you're irrelevant, and you know, this
is my career, this is how I support my family,
and if I'm not doing things that are at the
leading edge, it's a dangerous loop to be in because
you just start pushing to do things for not necessarily
(10:57):
the process but the outcome. I was still in the
process of trying to be the best at what I
do in the world. I didn't want to be number two,
and I also realized that my job is very physical.
I was getting older, and I had a finite amount
(11:18):
of time to really be pushing that leading edge. At
the same time, the thing that I had been focused
on for my entire life, singularly to the fault of
everything else in my life, even my family.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
Was becoming less important.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
To me doing expeditions, this passion that I had since
I was a kid didn't seem as valuable in comparison
to being around for my kids and being a good
dad and a partner. But you know, as a self
employed person, when you stop moving, the money stops coming in,
(12:00):
and so there's also a lot of stress associated with
that for me, you know, like a as a guide
and somebody who's traveling and travel.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
Shuts down, like there's your whole income.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
So as the world starts opening up and I have
some clients to go do my polar training, I'm kind
of psyched just to be working. I was kind of
packing up getting ready to go lead a polar training
course in the beginning of January, and three days before
I left, I got a colonoscopy because I hadn't been
(12:36):
feeling great. And when I woke up from the colonoscopy,
my wife was sitting in the room with me, which
I thought was weird because it was COVID and the
doctor's like, you're not going anywhere. You know, in hindsight,
it's very clear to me now, but at the time
(12:57):
it's a little like the frog in the water going
up a degree, not really knowing that the water is
going to start boiling pretty soon. But in July of
twenty twenty, I broke my collar bone. It was this
kind of a silly mountain biking accident, got a concussion,
had surgery, and for about the next month, I just
was like, Okay, I'm going to start feeling better any
(13:19):
day now.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
And I just never felt better.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
And I started losing weight and my you know, and
prior to that, I had had some digestive issues, and
but I you know, it's I'm coming and going, I'm
doing hard things. I'm having you know, on expeditions, We're
just eating is not like the healthiest of menu is
reading a lot of fat and sugar just for the
calorie sake and the weight saving sake, you know. Just
(13:47):
that whole fall of twenty twenty, I was just like, man,
something just doesn't seem right with me. This isn't normal,
like people recover from this in a normal way. And
I still don't feel great. And that's where I was like, Huh,
maybe there's a bigger issue here. When I look back now,
I was probably having issues for years and just didn't
(14:09):
think much about it. I was forty nine at the time,
and I was like, oh, I should probably get a colonoscopy.
It just seems like my cousin had been diagnosed with
coal rectal cancer. I was having these digestive issues. Honestly,
I thought maybe I had Parkinson's disease. My dad had
Parkinson's disease and one of the symptoms is, you know,
digestive problems.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
And I just didn't know. I just felt like I.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Was coming off the rails and I just couldn't really
put my finger on it. And it was I didn't
have I didn't have a doctor. I had to go
get a doctor's appointment just to get the referral to
go get the colonoscopy, you know. And at the time,
the recommendation was fifty years old, and the and the
doctor was like, well, you're not fifty yet. I'm like,
(14:53):
I know I'm not, but still I just don't feel right.
So I had to kind of convince him a little bit,
which is crazy. And when I wake up Maria and
my wife was in the room sitting right next to me,
I kind of knew.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
I knew, you know.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
The doctor came up, you have cancer. And I wasn't surprised.
I knew something was messed up with me. But my
first thought was, man, I got all these responsibilities. I
have to go leave for a trip in three days.
And the doctor he said, you're not going anywhere. You
have to have surgery. You know, right now, it's it's bad.
(15:40):
You know, you're just trying to keep it together. This
is the whole I was just staring down at my shoelaces. Luckily,
my wife Maria was with me, and you know, she
just rises of the challenge in a time of crisis,
and so she was on top of everything. And I
have so much empathy for people that have to go
through this totally alone. It's crazy because as again as
(16:05):
a healthy person, you're just not in this world, and
so everything's so new and for every situation.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
There's positively negative.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
And when you're dealing with the modern medical system, you know,
it's pretty easy to say this doesn't work, this doesn't work,
that doesn't work. For a large part, I agree with
a lot of that, but then there's also all these
systems and infrastructure that just works so flawlessly. So as
soon as you get into this system, okay, you know,
like you're on a path and and you come into
(16:35):
a fork, and the fork on the left is no cancer,
and the fork on the right is cancer. And so
then you're on the cancer path. And then there's all
this infrastructure and system designed to help you get through that.
But it's just it's like pouring a bucket of water
over your head because it's just thrown at you from nothing.
(16:58):
He could see that a very large tumor in my
colon and rectum, but they don't know where it is
and the rest of my body. So then maybe the
next day it's come down and get scans and then
they say, okay, well this many lymphnodes are impacted and
you have these spots in your lungs and so you're
(17:19):
going from zero to one thousand.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
In a very short time.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Do you just kind of start going down this path
of getting more information and processing that information? And it's crazy.
I'm an optimist. I mean I am. The glass is
not half full, but it's overflowing.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
You know.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
I don't really focus on negative things, but you know,
I think it's just like what do we believe? What's
our life view? I you know, if there's one thing
that Polar Expeditions tea, it's you're staggering insignificance in the world.
(18:05):
I mean, you're locked in this epic battle of survival
for days and weeks and months, and it's all consuming
it morning, noon and night, and your sleep and your dreams,
and at the end of the day, it's just this
arbitrary thing that you're doing. The rest of the world
is turning without you. People are waking up and going
(18:28):
to sleep, dying, fighting wars, fall in love, whatever it is,
and other people may find religion in those moments. You know,
my perspective is unique to me, and what I found
was just this insignificance, you know, and just arbitrary nature
(18:49):
of life. I very much realize that I'm not the
most important part of the system. It's a perspective that
I don't think a lot of people have overall, at
(19:10):
least I haven't run into people that have that, because
we always want to be the star in our own
movie and feel important. But when you just start looking
at the nature of life and the amount of people
who have been around and have been forgotten completely, and
the universe and time in general, it's just hard to
(19:35):
think that I'm important in any of that. You know,
I also am dealing with difficult environments where I'm not
in control of a lot of things, and there's an
arrogance in a lot of our perspectives in life. We're
(20:00):
in control. We can do this, And so when you
ask me, like am I going to fight this? I
never once had the mentality of like I'm gonna be cancer.
I never thought that. And now I'm not belittling that mindset,
because I think your mind can be a great asset
(20:22):
to you in difficult situations.
Speaker 3 (20:26):
It can also be the opposite.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
But for me, when I was diagnosed as initially stage four,
everybody knows enough about cancer and know that stage four
cancer isn't good, and you see the end. You know,
I went into the doctor and the doctor said, Okay,
(20:51):
you're stage four, you're in palliative care. Sign this piece
of paper that says you're impalliative care. And that's a
that's like signing your death certificate. Basically from my perspective
in that moment, I wasn't thinking about like, oh, I'm
the most badass dude who's going to beat this. I'm
(21:13):
thinking how can I get one more day with my kids?
And you know, colorectal cancer, you've got you know, four
years it's science, you know, like there's the percentages, and
I'm just thinking, Okay, what age will my kids be
(21:35):
when I die? What will they remember of me? And
comparing that with like, Okay, when I was twelve, what
did I remember? What memories do I have? And so
my mindset wasn't about beating cancer or being tough. It
(22:02):
was just how can I get a couple more days.
I'm not totally in control of all this, you know.
One of the things I've learned from expeditions. One of
the many things that I kind of translated and not
necessarily in the moment, but maybe with hindsight, but like,
(22:25):
hope is a dangerous thing. Like hope can be awesome,
like it can sustain you, Like I hope this happens.
But if if you're broke and you hope you're going
to win the lottery and you're you know, the chances
are so slim and when it never happens, man, that's
the hardest realization. And on expeditions, like when we kept
(22:49):
when I tried to hope for improving conditions.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
And something and.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
A break to come our way and then that doesn't happen.
The despair and downfall that you feel in those moments
is debilitating and so translating that idea to be a
diagnosi with stage four cancer. What I wanted to do
(23:14):
was just put myself in a situation where I could
just be around the things that were most important to me,
which was my family. And so prior to all this,
(23:38):
you know, I was chasing my tail a little bit.
I was trying to be this thing that I had
always wanted to be and reached a level of success,
but then found this other thing, which was being a
dad that I never really thought about. I mean, my
son was born, was a forty one, so I had
a whole adult life of epic shit and craziness, and
(24:06):
you know, kind of got blindsided about how important that
was to me. You know, when I got diagnosed was
simultaneously at this point in my life where I was like,
hey man, this thing that I'm doing doesn't seem as
important to me anymore, and maybe my greatest gift to
society is just being a good dad. You know, I
(24:31):
wouldn't say I was searching in my life, but you know,
the word exploration kind of implies that to find something
so meaningful in a way that you weren't looking for
(24:51):
just makes it all the more meaningful. Stage four cancer
is the worst thing you could hear, but it's also
the nature of the world, and I could have been
killed multiple times in a variety of ways. It's just,
you know, what's the direction we're all going where none
(25:15):
of us are getting out of it alive.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
And part of.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
The beauty of it is for a big chunk of
your life, you don't think about it, and time as
your friend, and you have unlimited time and it's not
part of your perspective.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
It's also the tragedy of it too, because.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
You don't think about it and you don't understand how
fragile everything is. Kind of the beauty and terrible aspect
of life all rolled into one. I think with expeditions
you become very focused on time. I mean, we run
(25:58):
every day on a very strict schedule, but we're also
dealing with time in a way that we don't do
in our normal lives. We're doing one singular thing without
a lot of variation. For you know, like I said, days,
weeks and months. That's just not how the rest of
(26:21):
our world works. We have so many variables. We're doing this,
we're here, We're there. You know, like every second is
action packed, and when somebody doesn't text you back in
five seconds, you think they are dead. You know, that's
how our world works. And so when you put yourself
in a situation where time moves on a different scale,
(26:42):
you kind of start to see all this stuff. And
I've always said, like, the best way to understand what's
important is you remove everything in your life. And that's
kind of what you do on an expedition, is you
put yourself in a situation where you remove all the
comfort inconvenience. In our culture, you know, we're not exposed
(27:11):
to death and dying. It's not part of our communications,
it's not part of our understanding of life. Yet it's
the thing that defines us all and in the US,
specifically in Western culture, I can't necessarily totally comment on,
but I think.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
In the US specifically, we just we push it aside.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
We focus on these successes in this human achievement. And again,
I think for me, through polar expeditions and through expeditions
in general, I've just seen another side.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
Of that.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
How temporary things are, as well as how insignificant one
person is. You know, I also believe that human beings
are designed to survive death, not in the person who dies,
(28:12):
but the person who knows the person who dies. Like,
we've all been in contact with death in some way,
and we get through it.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
We live our lives.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Partners lose spouses, kids lose parents, parents lose kids, friends
lose friends, and we move on. It's hard, it's difficult,
but we do it. I had an expedition partner that
killed himself a couple of years ago. When I was
listening in on the service, Darcy was his name, so
(28:48):
I say his name so that.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
I can remember.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
But you know, whoever was organizing it or the facilitator
was like, we're not here to litigate what happened and why.
Like it's but you get the time.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
You get, and let's just celebrate that fact.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
And you know, that really resonated with me. And I
think that that control is more of an illusion than anything.
In one sense, I parse down a lot of the
world in these really simple phrases. Training hard, travel easy,
(29:38):
Let's go up there and see what happens. Begin with
one step. The best way to be successful is not
have another choice. I find that those sound bites are
empowering and connective and so in one sense, the simple
story is also the good story, you know, or the
valuable one. But we miss the journey and all the
(30:06):
effort that goes into every waky moment. You know, even
just waking up in your bed and making breakfast is
like climbing Mount Everest for some people, you know, but
for better or worse. I feel like I've been lucky
because I am.
Speaker 4 (30:24):
Involved in one of the most arbitrary sports in the world,
where every day is the same and the end looks
just like the beginning in the middle, and so by.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Default I've come to appreciate the process more than the outcome.
There's a lot of stuff that goes on in between
the major talking points.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
When I got.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Sick, what I realized is all that time I spent
engaged in these completely arbitrary endeavors actually had a lot
of utility, whether it's risk tolerance. Like I am, I'm
in uncertain situations all the time, and so that's what
a medical a bad medical condition like cancer is. You're
(31:09):
just living in uncertainty and there's a lot of fear,
and so you deal with fear as well. You learn
how to compartmentalize fear, not necessarily push it away, but
just understand what it is. What we do on expeditions
is we have this routine, we have this schedule. We
take this big problem and we break it up into
these manageable pieces. And you know, if you think about
(31:32):
like chemo, like that's a big hole process over many
months that you just don't know how your body's going
to respond or your mind, and so, you know, I
never once thought about, oh, you know, I'm going to
be done pretty soon. I'm just like, Okay, you know,
we've got twelve weeks here. I'm just going to get
(31:53):
through this week and then we're going to get to
the next week, and then we'll go halfway. And even
then it was like, okay, now I've got radiation.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
I didn't allow.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
Myself to think about any of these next steps because
it's just so overwhelming. You can't deal with that. And
so you just kind of break the big problem up
into into the manual pieces, and that mindset.
Speaker 3 (32:13):
I think helps out a lot. I also think I.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Just think people have a lot of resilience, you know,
but we're not we don't we're not tested on a
given day about what we can overcome. If you just
kind of start moving forward, there's going to be a
path because there is this kind of resilience that we
all have that I don't think we're all aware of.
(32:38):
We're resilient beings, but we just don't. We don't know
that because we've we're a little more coddled now. When
you're engaged with kind of physically and mentally challenging things
that are overwhelming on a daily basis for years, it
(33:00):
just becomes kind of second nature. You're like, oh, okay,
here we are in another shitty situation with an uncertain outcome,
with the world going by without me. You know, that's Tuesday, Okay.
I can name instances where certain things happened. I went
(33:22):
to the doctor and I got diagnosed. I had to
sign a piece of paper that says I'm impallative care.
I had to go get a lung biopsy. Those are
significant moments. But did I become a completely different person
and forget all of the past. Definitely not. My body's
(33:43):
messed up. Yeah, I'm not the same person that I
was before I got diagnosed. I had fourteen inches of
my coal and taken out. I can't go to the
bathroom in the same way every day. I have to
get myself an animis. It's a pain in the ass
literally and figuratively. My life is forever change. But when
I think about it, I don't know if I would
(34:03):
not have gone through that experience and all that pain
and suffering and fear and everything. Like I just I
just feel it's made me a better person. Am I
a great person? Definitely not, you know, like there's still
room for improvement. Was I a jerk before? No, it's
(34:26):
just kind of another thing on this process. I will
say it's informed my life in ways that maybe other
things haven't because.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
It was so all encompassing. You know.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
There was now one moment where I was waking up
and like, oh, this is a care free Tuesday, What
am I going to do today? I go, you know, No,
it was like, you know, laying in bed with a
chemo pump hooked up to my port, trying not to puke,
listening to Maria and the kids eating dinner downstairs, thinking about, Oh,
this is what my house would.
Speaker 3 (35:00):
Be like without me in it.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
But you know, I think my biggest takeaway is just
this idea of compassion and how much value that has
and the compassion that was shown to me in some
of my weakest moments, you know, when you're.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
Just your most fragile.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
And someone goes out of their way.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
To make that moment.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
Better in whatever way, whatever small way. They might even
not be thinking about it. I mean I was when
I got my scans and whatever and stage four you
got four years to live. I got connected with a
really good doctor and he's like, hey, man, you might
want to check out those lungs. It might not be,
can't It looks like cancer probably is, but.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
It might not be.
Speaker 5 (36:07):
And so I I don't know how I did this,
but I was so focused on not interrupting my kid's life.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
I didn't want him to have my sickness be the
defining thing in their lives, you know. I didn't. And
I don't know if that's good or bad. It was
just what my mindset was. I didn't want to impact
them and take away from their joy of being kids
and have this dark cloud hanging over everything. So I
(36:44):
drove myself to Denver. Buddy took me to the hospital
in the morning, and I was laying there on the
bed getting all hooked up, and I just started thinking
about this procedure they were going to go in through
the side of my chest and go into my life ung,
deflate my lung, pull out some of this tissue, and
(37:05):
see if it's cancerous or not.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
And we had been on a roller coaster prior to that.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
You know, you get one piece of news that's good,
and you get another piece of news bad. It's just insane,
and so I was very both skeptical and just totally scared.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
I mean, I was so scared.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
I just was laying in bed alone and I just
started thinking about, like, what's the outcome of this procedure.
I was so scared. And they were wheeling me in
and I just started bawling, and I was crying so hard.
You're just so out of control, you know, like you
just you're a piece of meat, you know, just living
(37:47):
inside your own head. And there's all these perce you know,
like like I said, there's all these procedures and blah
blah blah. And and they lifted me up on this table.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
I was just so scared.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
But this nurse she just reached up and she just
took my hand and it was just you know, I
spent a lot of time alone and on my own,
and I'm pretty independent. I didn't really have an affectionate family.
(38:21):
It's not part of my psyche, but that little gesture
of just like hey man, I get it. It's fucking scary.
Speaker 6 (38:33):
That kindness has really informed my life, and like to
take that away would mean that I wouldn't have had cancer,
you know, but then I wouldn't also just deeply understand that.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
I always say that.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
I'm someone that learns lessons the hard way. I think
a lot of people probably know that just in their lives,
and for me, I feel like, you know, the best
way I learned is through the failures and the mistakes,
and so maybe it took this whole thing for me
to understand that role. And you know, when I look
back at my life and especially like in expeditions, you know,
(39:19):
when was the time that I was my best?
Speaker 3 (39:22):
You know? Was it when I.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
Was like, you got to be tougher? Not really, you know,
it was when I was giving somebody a hug.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
I just look at the world through that filter.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
Now again, I think what a lot of my life
is is kind of you know, I'm a slow learner.
I got to put myself in these difficult situations to
get the grains. But I think I'm a guy who
(39:57):
will wade through a mile of crap to get the
one positive thing. And this is where being an optimist
is helpful. Like I had to deal with the worst
experience of my life. Cancer is an atom bomb that
destroys everything that it touches.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
Our family, the challenges.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
That we all went through, our Maria and our relationship,
and how difficult that was at times in our darkest
of dark days. The intense pain of just everything, not
only the chemo, but the surgery and this terrible infection
I had after surgery. I couldn't sit in a chair
for five months. I was in so much pain I
could barely walk addicted to oxycodone. It was brutal. But
(40:42):
I don't think about any of those things on any
given day at all. And what I think about is
just that enhanced perspective of, you know, the role that
compassion plays, and understanding and giving somebody the benefit of
(41:03):
the doubt.
Speaker 3 (41:06):
Stick of work in me. I don't need anything else
after that.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
Welcome back to Alive again. Joining me for a conversation
about today's story. Are my other Alive against story producers
Nicholas Dakowski and print Day, and I'm your host Dan
Bush we usually have stories of people, you know, of
people who's near death experience or they're brush with death
like transformed them and informed like a new sense of
self and a new sense of purpose and meaning, and
(41:53):
like solidify their connection with the universe. But I, like
I was, I asked Eric to talk to me because
this or is the opposite of that. His experience of
suffering and putting himself in these extremely adverse, life threatening
conditions informed how he dealt with his battle with cancer.
Speaker 7 (42:12):
So I was very curious. I was like, well, how
did that inform your understanding or your you know, when
you were faced with stage four colorectal cancer.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
And what he said.
Speaker 7 (42:24):
Was shocking because I expected I expected Eric to say,
you know, it was all about attitude or some story
where his positivity, his optimism, his resilience, his sort of confidence.
You know, I expected him to tell about how he
you know, his internal monologu or his narrative was positive
(42:48):
and so therefore, you know, it gave him because he
hears stories about that people saying really positive during their
cancer their battles with cancer, and the ones that are
more positive tend to have better outcomes and so forth.
So I was thinking maybe that was what he would say,
but he's he didn't. He said, no, life is harsh.
You don't know what's coming.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
There is no.
Speaker 7 (43:08):
Certainty. You know, the universe is completely fucking indifferent and and.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Hope will kill you.
Speaker 7 (43:19):
I was just stunned by his Here again he's another
person who said he would he would not take back
his experience. He said, humans are innately resilient. We have
the capacity to endure pain and suffering and doubt.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
We just have that.
Speaker 7 (43:40):
And so his his whole philosophy is like we should
get we should just lean into suffering. We should just
become familiar with it. We should become comfortable with it,
because that's that's that's how we grow and that's part
of life.
Speaker 8 (43:49):
Oh, I mean, it's it's I think, I think something
that I walked away from, and it is he was.
It was just, uh, it was him talking about how
like go on these you know, thirty day expeditions, and
how it was the same thing and you just focused
on like the little thing that you had in front
(44:10):
of you that you did over and over and over
and over, day after day, minute by minute, and that
was what the way you get through it is by
kind of just focusing on what is immediately in front
of you and what you can deal with. And I
think that that was just something that that's just a
very good, a very good life lesson in general. And
(44:34):
it sounds like he applied that definitely to the cancer,
just dealing with the thing that's right in front of
you and just being hyper focused on that thing. And
that's how you that's how you survive, is by doing
the same little thing over and over and and I
think that that. I mean, Jesus, if that ain't a
(44:55):
metaphor for life, you know, I mean, like.
Speaker 9 (44:59):
Well, that's the same, that's the same thing that Anely's
Cochrane said in her story about the fires and Lahaina, Hawaii.
You know, she said that she just would think about
what was two feet in front of her. The story
about the Dave Meadows who just survived the tsunami in Thailand,
he was I could only think about what was thirty
(45:20):
feet in.
Speaker 3 (45:21):
Front of me.
Speaker 9 (45:22):
When Eric says, you know, you know, going on these
expeditions taught him not to think, to worry about, or
to put too much faith into in hope, because if
you put your faith in hope and you come around
the bend and that thing you're hoping for is not there.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
It just right totally destroys you.
Speaker 8 (45:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (45:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (45:42):
He talked a lot about breaking big problems into small steps,
and I found that that's not only for my lack
of executive functioning. If I look at the big picture,
I get overwhelmed and I literally have to make a
list and then I have to just kind of cover
everything up except the one thing at the top of
the list, and then I'm going across it off and
move to the next thing. I'm multitasking is not something
(46:03):
I'm capable of. I used to think I was.
Speaker 2 (46:05):
I'm terrible at it.
Speaker 8 (46:07):
I'm terrible at it. I still think that I'm killing
it most of the time.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
But I'm not.
Speaker 6 (46:12):
I'm not.
Speaker 9 (46:15):
This story was I mean, this story really spoke to me,
maybe more than a lot of the others. I just
the story really spoke to me, because you know, I
think those of us who picked difficult career fields, nobody
on this call trying to make it in. Trying to
make a career out of taking pictures and writing stories
(46:36):
and making videos and films is about like trying to
make a career out of climbing mountains, and you do
become very focused on man, if I could make this film,
or if I could get this client, or if I
could write this piece for this magazine, And that becomes
a way to define who you are.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
And it does become about your little notches that.
Speaker 9 (47:01):
You put on your belt rather than the process itself
of just living your life and being able to create.
And when he talked about COVID being a relief because
he was able to spend time with his daughter, I
just remember that myself. When COVID came, it was like,
I don't have to be on the hustle right now,
you know, I can give myself permission to be with
my family. And it's I think that's the thing I
(47:24):
took out of this story more than anything. Even if
you got four years to live because you have colorectal cancer,
those are moments you can really dial down and be
with your family and really be part of the process,
you know, rather than trying to check a box, you know,
trying to achieve something.
Speaker 7 (47:44):
There were really two takeaways that I think the story
you know gave to me, or that I walked away
with that idea that compassion is the connective tissue of
life and death. So like again, he didn't walk away
with this profound sense of God's unconditional love. He walked
(48:06):
away with this view of the staggering and difference of
the universe, but is isolated and cold as that sort
of indifference of the universe is. He said that there's
utility in it. It takes shape and our ability to
be compassionate, you know, it forces compassion and our understanding
(48:31):
towards one another, and that the loneliness and isolation in
time and space is necessary.
Speaker 3 (48:39):
For that compassion.
Speaker 7 (48:41):
It's the driving force of humanity and sort of what
interconnects us and keeps us. And it's an idea that
continues to a lot of these stories. People end up
with the same thing of the takeaway is reflected again
and again, where get myself Once I'm removed my ego
from the city suation which I Once I get out
of the the idea of myself and get beyond that,
(49:07):
then you're then they realize that that it's not about
sort of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and the self,
you know, the the resilience or sort of the the
self confidence that we all try to imbue upon our
kids of like, you know, self reliance. I guess I'm
trying to say that's valuable when there's nothing else absolutely
(49:32):
to keep you alive. But the more important element to
our experience is one of compassion and of helping each
other and of connectivity. And I think that that's that
was his takeaway. He's like, you know, I've spent my
life out here alone, in the wilderness and in the
in the frozen tundra, uh in the extremes conditions of
(49:58):
our planet. And and once he got cancer, he was like,
I just want to be with my kids. I just
want to spend time with those that I love and
that love me. And the other thing that I took
from his story is that, you know, it echoes other
stories too, that the idea that we this is not
that we're here to suffer, but that suffering, you know,
(50:20):
overcoming obstacles, challenges, trials, just like in the stories that
we write as filmmakers. It's not that we have to suffer,
but that growth. For growth to happen, suffering is necessary.
Speaker 2 (50:39):
Well.
Speaker 9 (50:39):
And I think that that drive to define yourself by
whatever your career path is, and however you define personal
excellence in that field I do think that's an important
drive to have at a young age, you know, And
I think it drives you into whether you achieve the
things that you set out to do or not. I mean,
I think it sets you on a path where you
(51:00):
do face those challenges, and I think that's important part
of growing. I remember I was watching the Olympics one
year and there was like a they were talking to
some middle aged athletes who had won a gold when
she was like eighteen or something, and she said, they
were like, do you miss the competition? She said, no,
I feel like accomplished what I said on this what
I said on this earth to do. And I thought, gosh,
(51:20):
wouldn't that be great at age eighteen, I feel like
you were You've accomplished what you set out to do.
But I think you're I just think you know, you're.
Your desires and needs definitely change as you get older.
I mean, the idea of accomplishing some of the things
that were really important to you when you're young. As
(51:41):
you get older, as you have your family, you know,
you start to realize they're not quite as pressing, you know.
Like I remember, I was never one who was like, oh,
I just need to have a family, and I need
to get married. And I remember when I did, just
looking at my wife and saying, you know, you're a
gift that I never asked for. I never I wanted
to have a film and sun dance, or I wanted
(52:01):
to publish a book or something, and those things didn't
happen for me. But I got this wife and it
was better than anything I could have imagined, you know.
And then now I have daughters, and it's like it's
what Eric describes, it's like, you know, he he accomplished
a lot of his professional goals, and he still felt
driven to do more and this slowed him down to
just enjoy the process. He enjoy and I family, He totally.
Speaker 7 (52:26):
He and I had a like when we first did
our initial call before the interview, he and I really
had a We really connected because he's fifty three years old.
He's the exact same age that I am, and he,
you know, we share a lot in common, you know,
as in terms of just where we are in life
(52:46):
and what's left of life. You know, there's a ticking
clock and what are you going to do with it?
Speaker 1 (52:50):
And he was just a very compassionate guy and very
relatable in fact, he invited me to go on one
of his Polar Expedition training courses. Like anyway, I just
I really, you know, when I was done talking to him,
I felt I felt like I found a friend. And
(53:14):
I just love that he's such a realist. He's not
walking away going I have figured out that there is
love in the universe, and that love is the texture
of the matrix of all things. And then when we
should not fear death and that you know, he walked
away with a very different kind of His ability to
survive cancer had to do with a very different, more practical,
(53:36):
more utilitarian sort of.
Speaker 7 (53:41):
Strategy. And it didn't make him suddenly see God, you know,
it just made him understand that whether you see God
or not, compassion is ultimately and connection or ultimately the
things that we really need to thrive.
Speaker 3 (54:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 8 (54:01):
I think a lot of these are a lot of
these are very uplifting. But I think the ones that
really kind of get me is when is the ones
where you're not offered proof of an afterlife, you're not
offered anything like that. You're basically just like go through
(54:22):
this and you recognize how close you were, and it's
just like you just kind of like go, uh, okay,
well I have to draw my own conclusions here. Nobody's
gonna like hand me this. Like there's not some white
light that I get to walk into and like no,
it's gonna be okay. It's like I just kind of
have to keep guessing and just just keep like moving
(54:46):
forward based on the information that I have in front
of me, put in a new context. And I think
that I think that's really interesting. I think there's there's
something like super I mean, it's fair, it's it's super huge.
It's just very human, you know, mm hmm, so absolutely.
Speaker 9 (55:08):
I just remember, like when I was younger, just thinking
of the idea of sitting at home with my family
and all the things you hear about the comment the
contentment of being with your family and middle age and
now I'm going to be with my I just remember
just thinking like how corny and contrite and how boring
that would be. And and I just you know, like
(55:29):
he talks about like if you're not you know, what
do you say, If you're not moving, you're irrelevant. If
you're not doing things in the leading edge, you're irrelevant.
Speaker 3 (55:37):
You know.
Speaker 9 (55:37):
Whether that was in his field, yeah, in his field
and in our field, and even in your social life
and going out and having fun, and you get to
a point where you're just like, you know, if I
don't go to another art party or see another band,
or have to pack my car with gear for a
shoot again, I'll be okay with that. I'm happy to
just sit with my family. And I remember the real
bridge was when I turned fifty, because I remember I
(55:57):
woke up that morning and logged into Facebook and somebody
was starting some kind of political argument or something, and
I was about to chime in, and I'm like.
Speaker 4 (56:05):
I'm fifty, I don't really I don't really care whatever.
Speaker 10 (56:10):
You know.
Speaker 9 (56:11):
I think that's when you start to wear the you know,
world's number one Grandpa hat, and you start to not
worry about what shoes you're you're wearing out. It's just
like you're just like, I'm content.
Speaker 7 (56:19):
It's interesting that it takes us that long to the
meturation rate is fifty years, to get to the point
where we don't care about external validation.
Speaker 2 (56:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 9 (56:30):
I remember reading an interview with like one of the
guys from a Clash and he said, you know, we
had the number one critically acclaimed album of the eighties,
and now I paint houses because I can't get a job.
And I was like, but you had the number one
critically acclaimed album of the eighties. I mean, that's what
life is for. And I'm like, if I had a
number one album critically acclaimed album of the eighties at
(56:51):
this point in my life, I'd be like, Okay, I
think I'd like to go paint.
Speaker 2 (56:54):
My house and maybe with my daughter.
Speaker 9 (56:55):
I really care about that.
Speaker 7 (56:57):
Like Nick said, being the kindness is more important than success.
Speaker 1 (57:04):
Next time, on a Live Again, we hear the story
of Rune Colbeck, who survived a bizarre encounter with a
serial killer in Anchorage, Alaska, and still grapples with the
psychological impact of the incident.
Speaker 10 (57:17):
The whole encounter, I mean, it just took seconds, but
it felt like it felt like an eternity. It was
playing out enough of that I kept being surprised that
I wasn't dead yet.
Speaker 1 (57:37):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent Die,
Nicholas Dakowski, and Lauren Vogelba music by Ben Lovett, Additional
music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick
and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional
production support. Our studio engineers are Rima el Kali and
(57:57):
Nums Griffin. Our editors are Dan Gerhart Slovichca, Brent Die
and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben love It and Alexander Rodriguez.
I'm your host, Dan Bush. Thanks to Eric Larson for
sharing his story. To learn more about Eric and his work,
go to Eric larsenexplore dot com. That's e r I
(58:18):
c l A r s e n e x p
l o r e dot com. Alive Again is a
production of i Art Radio and Psychopia Pictures. If you
have a transformative near death experience to share, we'd love
to hear your story. Please email us at Alive Again
Project at gmail dot com. That's a l I v
(58:40):
e A g A I N p r o j
e c t at gmail dot com. Four two
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