no time like the future an optimist considers mortality

that I was no longer going to make lemonade,” he says. “For some reason, it was almost instantaneous.

Then the first time he was alone in his New York City apartment, he slipped and fell, shattering his arm.Īfter everything he had gone through, Fox says that was “the cutting blow.” If the tumor wasn’t removed, Fox would have been paralyzed by now, his doctor told him.įollowing the surgery, it took Fox a while to learn to walk again, but once he did, he insisted to his family that he was independent and could be left alone. Most doctors didn’t want to operate on it, but a surgeon at Johns Hopkins University agreed to perform the incredibly dangerous surgery. You can be a realist and an optimist at the same time.”įox’s recent misfortune began when a benign tumor he and his doctors had been watching for years grew in size and was actually on his spinal cord, he says. “And I stitch this together into the story of what happened and how I lost and regained my optimism and how my new optimism is kind of a little more informed and a little more realistic. “I examined all these things: fear, aging, gratitude, just all of these things came through my mind,” he says. Through it all, Fox found a way to maintain his signature optimism - until 2018, when his sunny disposition took a significant hit after undergoing spinal surgery and a serious fall forced him to confront his mortality.įox writes about how those recent setbacks forced him to rethink his outlook in his new memoir, ' No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality.' He says he went through a long period of reflection and came out of it with a kind of realistic optimism. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, which since then has raised a billion dollars to find a cure. The actor shot to fame with roles in the sitcom “Family Ties” and the “Back to the Future” trilogy.īut in 1991 at the age of 29, Fox was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s disease. (Courtesy Flatiron Books) This article is more than 2 years old.Įditor's note: This segment was rebroadcast on July 5, 2021.

No time like the future an optimist considers mortality