There Are Two Kinds of Passion: One You Should Follow, One You Shouldn't | Big Think

There Are Two Kinds of Passion: One You Should Follow, One You Shouldn't

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive video lessons from top thinkers and doers

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When Richard M. Cohen visited the Big Think studio, he came in carrying a quote by Virginia Woolf. It was printed in large font, which seems an odd choice unless you know that Cohen is legally blind, one of the many consequences of the multiple sclerosis he was diagnosed with at 25 years old. Another is his fluctuating voice, a neurological symptom of the disease. Unable to read the quote, we promised to place it here:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

RICHARD M COHEN:

Richard M. Cohen began his network television news career at ABC News in 1971 as assistant producer of Issues and Answers and floor producer for ABC News at both 1972 political conventions. He went on to a 20-year career in network television news.

Cohen was a producer on PBS’s McNeil Lehrer Report and in 1979, for The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, serving as Dan Rather’s producer when he assumed the anchor chair in 1981. At CBS, Cohen covered the rise of the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland and wars in the Middle East and Central America. He specialized in politics, directing presidential campaign coverage for CBS News in 1984 and 1988. In 1989, Cohen produced and directed “Illusions of News with Bill Moyers” for PBS and in 1992, “Bill Clinton of Arkansas” for CNN. Cohen has been the recipient of numerous awards in journalism, including three Emmys, a George Foster Peabody and a Cable Ace Award.

Cohen is the author of Blindsided, published in 2004, which chronicled his battles with multiple sclerosis and cancer, and Strong at the Broken Places in 2008, both New York Times Best Sellers. He also published a countercultural ode to everyone's pet madness called I Want to Kill the Dog in 2012. Cohen wrote 'Chronically Upbeat', a semi-weekly online column for AARP: The Magazine. His new book, Chasing Hope, will be released in 2018.

Richard M. Cohen is married to journalist Meredith Vieira, with whom he has three grown children.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Richard M. Cohen: I have a very—I've had a very skittish relationship with hope going back to when I was diagnosed with MS. I really didn't believe in the idea of hope for a long time. Frankly, I thought it was for weak people, you know, I thought that the strength, personal strength and perseverance, could replace hope.

And when I was at the Vatican I met with a lot of doctors and scientists who were already doing stem cell therapy and I was really quite taken. I mean, I was quite surprised. I always sort of had a futuristic view of stem cell therapy; I thought it sounded great, but it was down the road. And I had this flash of hope that I had never felt before and it really washed over me. I mean it was quite astonishing to me.

And frankly, having met all these people, I was determined to find somebody to help me. And one of the people on my panel was a neurologist named Saud Sadiq who's a big MS guy in New York, and he invited me to come see him when I got back to New York, and I really had in my head—and by the way, he casually mentioned that he had an application into the FDA, and I was really interested.

And when the FDA approved the trial, which had taken years of lobbying to make happen, he told me that I was going to be the first one he treated, not for any reason except that I had an unusual presentation of the disease because it's on one side of my body. Most people, it's on both sides so it was much easier to chart progress or the lack of progress with me.

So I was literally the first person in the world to be treated with this specific kind of cell that's called mesenchymal cells, which are big, blank stem cells. And that was the beginning of the trial.

But I started writing at that point and I realized that I had an attitude about hope that was changing, it was in flux. And I thought the search for hope would be a good book because finding hope for me was a journey, you know.

Look, my head is not in the clouds. I'm not whistling 'Dixie' and skipping down the street. On the other hand, I think that my bearing and my demeanor have changed. I think I'm a brighter person, not a smarter person, but a more voluble person.

I think my state of mind has changed, you know. And hope—though hope and optimism are different, hope can breed optimism. And I think I'm more optimistic about changing my life than I have been. There are no—look, I mean, life is a journey for the healthy and the sick....

For the full transcript, check out