 Welcome to Finding Happiness in Hard Times. I'm Ken Burtness and I'm coming to you from Haleva out at the North Shore. And today we're returning to that special series that we've got on Big Questions. And today I've got three special guests that I'm sure you'll enjoy. We're gonna talk again about what is important. Very difficult and a hard question for us to not only answer for ourselves but answer and share with other people. It gives us direction and that's what we need to find happiness. But it also makes us uncomfortable because when we ask ourselves what is important, we may not be acting in line with what we feel is important. And that makes us feel uncomfortable. It also brings up the uncertainty of what might be in the future because everything changes for us over time including what is important. So what is important to us 10 years ago or 20 years ago may not be important to us today. So we constantly really need to update ourselves. And that's something that we don't tend to do. Like I said, it tends to make us uncomfortable and we like to keep things short and breezy. Sort of like with our social conversations with a lot of people. So with that difficult question that I'm gonna pose, now let me introduce my three good friends Richard McPherson, Stephen Katz and Bob Brown. Welcome to the show guys. Thank you very much. Aloha. All right. And two months ago, I had three guests who were ladies and they were like the three guests I have today very talented and knowledgeable. And so today I wanted to go back to that same question except this time have my three male friends here. And to be honest with you, I'm not expecting much difference because our gender differences over the past 10 years and I'm so old I can look back over a long time. We've made a lot of progress here. And so I think we've, the gender differences have gotten less, but you never know. And so today we're gonna find out and of course there are a lot of other individual things that are working here too. So I think you're gonna enjoy these answers. Today I've started, I asked Steve to start off with everything. So Steve, I'm gonna turn, what is important over to you? Okay, you gave us this topic I don't know a month ago or so and I've procrastinated dealing with it until recently of course. And I've used my job as a therapist selfishly and unselfishly because it's a great question to ask people when they come in for therapy. Like it's another way of asking somebody what their goals are, right? Like if I was successful as a therapist, what would be different? Sort of like can the miracle question, if a miracle happened you didn't have a problem anymore how would you know it? What would be different? And but with a different twist, like what's important? And then of course this past week, what's come up because we live in Hawaii is what happened in Lahaina. And the people there are dealing with that question in a very existential way. I mean, you know that old question if your house is on fire, what do you grab? You just have seconds to look around the house. And I think it just sort of confirmed what all the people that I asked and myself because I wrote my own little spiel before I asked them. And pretty much everybody said the same thing as number one and it was their relationships to other people. So if your house is on fire, the first thing you look around you say is there anybody else in my house that I have to save? You know, and then who do I call? Most of the people, I think all of the people that I asked said it's about their relationships to other people. It's about feeling connected to other people. One or two, like some of my people in recovery put that as number one. Like perhaps like one guy I just spoke to today said, it's my sobriety and God and my family. Number one, my wife and children. And that's what's important to them. Although I didn't have an outlier sort of who was very interesting. At first she said something similar to that but then she said, you know, here in Hawaii money is very important to me because it's a very hard place to live. And it's really hard if you like she was suffering because although she's, you know, a 50-something year adult woman she can't afford her own place to live. And she said, now she's in the dating scene again. She feels very crass. But if somebody doesn't make enough money, she's not interested because that's important. You know, and maybe it has something to do with the Maslow hierarchy of needs, right? You need the basic foundations. You need enough a place to live and food, sustenance and a sense of safety. Those come first. But I pretty much agreed once those things are covered it's to me, it's about feeling connected and it's about having a sense of purpose in your life is right up there for me. A reason to get up in the morning. And for me, that's about helping others. Okay, over to Bob. Bob, you're up. Hey, well, I like Steve. I had a lot of thoughts about what's important to me and what I came up with. You know, there's three categories of areas that are important to me. One is obviously relationships and learning how to maintain those relationships, which has been a struggle for me over the years. Learning to maintain them, learning how to make friends, especially as time goes by and you're getting up in years and learning, trying to learn how to make friends as an adult and then maintain the ongoing ones. Also, adjusting the circumstances over time, health, maintaining a sense of being grateful for me and also having a purpose, learning. So for me, I'm 76 years old. So as you age, all these, what's important changes. Right now, time is important. You have a lot less time than I did 30 years ago, 40 years ago. And so it's about choosing things and stepping in that kind of right direction. One little, my little cliches that I always talk about with people is I have a learning, I'm learning how to make friends with unstructured time. You know, I grew up in a structured environment, work, that kind of thing, military. And now I retired, but I made a choice that I wasn't going to, I was going to only create what was good for me. So nothing gets created unless I create it. I don't have anything that I have to do. And then there I have these choices to make and that really brings out what's important to you. And I'm learning how what's important to me and some of the things that are important to me I'm getting better at and some I really need to work on. And so I'm going to stop there. This is an endless subject and it's always changing. Absolutely. Great points, Bob. Thank you. Richard, over to you. Learn your lines. Great. Steve knows what I'm talking about. I know what you're talking about. Me too. You know, and I say that because I've come to this realization that I want to feel like I'm a professional, that I'm doing something that when I look at somebody do a job well, I appreciate it. And so I see that when I do theater, I at least have this sense that I am doing everything that I can possibly do to create something. And I feel in complete control of it. And I get tremendous satisfaction out of it. And you know, I'm here in Hollywood pretending to be an actor. And so I got this chance with Steve to come back to Hawaii and we did everything. We created this all on our own. We got a theater. We produced it. And I know we both had this tremendous sense of satisfaction that, you know, one, we still can remember things. And we helped each other. So that to me was extremely important for my well-being. You know, because I thought, no, I'm still capable. And I thought, you know, there's this whole question about being retired and I don't know that I really could get my head around that. But you know, you want to stay in the game. You want to be alive. You want to be a matter. And I really want to talk about literature because I was an English teacher, but there's these key books along the way that just helped shape me and who I am. And the first book I wanted to mention was a book called How to Survive in Your Native Land, which was written by a teacher, a fourth grade teacher. And after I read that book, I realized, well, I could be a teacher because I saw myself in the way he created this world that I didn't really understand. But he made it so interesting that I thought, oh, OK. That's a profession I think I could do. And thank goodness I did it. And then the other book that I want to mention is Slaughterhouse 5 because Vonnegut really gave me the lowdown on war. And so when I was like 18, 19, I had to really go and think about what I was being asked to do. And I thought for him to describe the horror and what he went through and somehow get close to this just unimaginable absurd thing that he was going through. And I thought, oh, I'm going to have to deal with this. But it helped sharpen my mind and think, OK, I can make a choice here. It's my life and whether I want to engage in on this. And I love humor. I think humor is just so important. So I always like to quote Mark Twain because he said, I tried religion, but I didn't take to it. So that really helped me because I was brought up in such a strict way as a Catholic and it was all black and white. And I was always going to confession. And I was just like tired of all of that. So I thought, OK, I'm going to figure this out on my own. And so the other thing I want to talk about is my family because my father, who was an accountant, he would paint nudes inside book covers. And he saw himself, he wanted to be an artist. So you know that blank white page in the books? There's nudes. There were these books and there's new paintings that my father did. And then my brother was in the basement and he took one wall and he painted it completely black and put an eye right in the middle. And so what I do is I took bowling balls and covered them in sea glass. So somehow it all fits about being an artist. And you know, like I had to do it. I had to do it. I had like 14 bowling balls before they, you know, I couldn't. My house was, you know, too many bowling balls. But anyway, Steve got a bowling ball for me, by the way. Great stuff. Yeah. So am I out of time? Yeah, pretty much. Okay. Cause I wanted to throw it up into a discussion, but great, great things. And of course I'm sitting here, having done many years as an amateur actor compared to, not quite in the same class as Richard and Steve, but having a great time. I was also thinking of, you know, the fear most people have of all of a sudden being out in public and being naked. Of course, my great fear was being coming out on stage and forgetting my lines. It's the big thing that for, for an actor. Yeah, it's the thing. And of course, of course war, which we're going through right now. And I hope to maybe ask you guys back for maybe some comments on that one time in the future, because those are things that happen and stay with us. Just like slaughterhouse five, the main character in slaughterhouse five was going back and forth out of that war continually. And that's the way it is with people. Those are things that you don't forget that keep intruding upon your life. So one of the things that what is important to us is again, helping us not only find direction, but helping us find focus. And we don't want to be focusing all the time in our life on things that we don't want to do. And I appreciate Richard telling us that you pursued things that you wanted to do. And that is really, really important. Okay, let me throw it open to you guys and open for any additional comments and elaborations, comments on what the other guys said. And who's ready to start. You know, it's interesting. I was thinking along this subject, obviously, a lot of things come up when you think about what's important to me and let it float. Well, all of a sudden it just popped in my head, you know, it's like I have had a relationship with my children longer as them with as adults than I had when they as them being my kids. You know, my kids were seemed like that would be always be my kids. Well, they are, but now they're 50 and 40. And then they have lives of their own. And it's like adjusting over time to that adult relationship. So that that's relationships change. Life changes. Time changes things. And it's really important. I've been discovering to stay curious. And to be in a position where I can be creative and helpful. Because I need to feel like I'm contributing. Even though I'm not working, which is fine. That's exactly what I don't want to do. Yeah, but I am volunteering. I'm creating art. And I'm doing things in the community that that I feel are important, which reflects what's important to me. Yeah. And maintaining my relationship with my wife. And friends. And then learning to create new ones. And then you see making. Men male friends. Later on in life, because everybody is in there. Stuck in their patterns. And then decide to make adjustments for some people, including myself. And I'm going to stop there. Yeah. Well, I want to jump in and thank you, Richard, for. The first thing you said, learning your lines. Because you know what a panic I was in before. All during the rehearsal process of our play. It felt like some kind of a death. And so I'm also trying to relate the. What that thrill is of being on stage. To the other things like the feeling connected. To other people. And it's true that the feeling that I get when I'm on stage and it's good, like. I know my lines. Is a feeling of being very connected. Not only to other people, but maybe primarily. To myself is like this. This, you know, make me one with everything kind of thing. I'm like so. In the moment. Focused feeling. Not worried. You know, feeling like a whole person, like sufficient. Like. In almost the rest of my life. And sometimes I feel like that. In therapy sessions. Cause, and I think that's why I like. Being a therapist is because I have that when it's good. I have this intense feeling of connection. I feel like I'm in the right place at the right time. And I worry about that a lot, like. Outside of that sphere. Like, am I doing enough. For my kids. For my community. You know, now there's the disaster. Am I doing enough in that realm. Am I doing enough for my kids. Even though they're adults. I'm still their father. I'm still their father. I'm still their father. And in my friendships too. Am I doing enough. And like you, Bob, I struggle with that is. Maintaining. One-to-one friendships with other men. Which. I'm pretty lousy at two. Well, I would certainly not agree with that because Steve. Heads up a men's group. And. Which has been going for 12 years. And he has made a big difference in a lot of men's lives by bringing them together and getting them to talk about important things. Rather than just. You know, what kind of beer we're going to drink tonight or what kind of sports we got to watch on the television, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah. Thank you. Yeah, but I mean, I made that group. Because I was thinking, oh, that'll fix it. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, I made that group. And because I was thinking, oh, that'll fix it. No, it only fixes it every other week on Sunday morning. The rest of the time is I'm still struggling. We all still struggle. That's. That's why it's important to keep asking ourselves what's important. And to keep on track. Because I don't know about you guys, but I tend to procrastinate. So. And I certainly would second Richard is saying about and Steve about the performance. We all have peak experiences in our life where we. Feel connected. And some of my. Well, one of my big peak experiences was opening. A show. Not only a show, but opening a new theater. Back in the 60s and going on stage. Not being able to see the stage. Or talk to anybody because the lights were in my eyes and I couldn't see theirs. But I felt that connection. And that's what all relationships do. If we're really there in the moment. Moment with ourselves so we can be true to ourselves. But also to share truly with other people. And Steve was asking us at the beginning of the show. He says, Well, what would you take with you if everything's burning up? Like, you know, of course, relating to that Maui. Wildfires, which I'll mention at the end of the show. But one of the things that I'm doing as an old person is. Finding ways to get rid of stuff. And I'm organizing stuff. And one of the ways. He thinks I'm organizing as my pictures. My pictures of my life. And I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. Firebase pictures, my pictures of my life. And my friends and my people. And believe me, If there's a fire in my house. That's going to be one of the first things that I grab. Is a picture of the people that are important to me. Richard talks back to you. Well, you know, I probably saved my Elvis costume. That came down to. I must tell you guys that I feel like this this year I've been in this kind of river of grief, lots of deaths and just you know so I look for this I look for this kind of brightness that that's why I relate to the theater because it's it's taught me a lot about understanding life and so it's almost spiritual to me what what you can go to the theater for and what people write about and so that's why I've sort of seized on it as a way to to understand myself and to you know like you you know you you give your attention to something you think is valuable and and I think that's what Steve and I did you know we just we we decided this was important to us and so it was a beautiful thing so I'm you know really happy that we got to do that you know that's terrific uh guys that we're running uh you know it's getting close to closing time how about some final thoughts from each of you uh last minute things that maybe you can leave uh with the audience who are also finding it difficult to tackle these big questions and to uh to find our way into like the title of my show says during real hard times and uh so final thoughts final ideas final point by something different because um I went to a class uh to at the Honolulu Museum of Art and uh that was like 10 years ago and now I've been painting for all that time and creating and uh I made a big difference I was scared stiff to go well I was gonna look bad way to go way to go um you know Sartre said uh I think it was hell as other people um but truthfully I found that I really do I really do like people I appreciate them I appreciate my neighbors I like the fact that I have contact with them and that you really can offer yourself to them and you know be of assistance and that there's something really beautiful about that you know you can kind of get it brings into focus what what's important is is really helping other people so well my two cents I guess would be sort of an advice to myself and anybody else that wants to do it is if there's something that you've been procrastinating because you're a little afraid it won't go well that's what you need to do um there's a few things like that in my life and I'm giving myself right here a little on screen recorded pep talk let's go for it you got nothing to lose remind me about that next time we're together okay you can ask the same thing okay yeah um yeah I mean some of the best things in my life like my wife happened because of I dared to do something that I wouldn't normally do yeah well said yes you know and because the last three years we've been in that you know really locked down from the coronavirus and it's been hard for a lot of people to get back together to reach out to other people to try new things like Bob is saying and to be helpful you know like you all are saying with other people so now's the time for us to do that and and I hope that for those of you watching the show that it's also encouraged you to sort of step out and reach out and maybe help some person be in the moment do some things that you haven't been doing and been procrastinating on and maybe watching a little less news on television or things that make you unhappy and looking to follow your bliss like I think the people on my panel are doing and have done and I think that's really really important thank you Steve thank you Bob thank you Richard I really appreciate you being on the show thank you especially thanks to Richard who's coming all the way to us from the mainland and that's always a great thing and coming to me from my hometown I was born in Hollywood and raised in the San Fernando Valley so I have a special affinity for that but thanks to all of you who are listening into the show and thanks to the people that think take away Michael and Jay and Haley and Carol and all the people who make this possible I hope you join us in two weeks uh for the next two shows and our my show is always usually on a Wednesday at two o'clock or excuse me we tape on Wednesday at two and we'll show it to everybody on Thursday at two o'clock we're going to be concentrating on what Steve brought out at the beginning of the show and that is the Maui fires that are going on and the tragedy that's unfolding with us in the islands and for people all around because everybody can relate there's been so much disasters worldwide from climate change in various ways not only wildfires but floods and and you name it uh so we hope that you'll uh join us then and thanks to everybody and everybody have a good day aloha