"I try not to get too New Age-y. I don’t talk about things being 'for a reason.' But I do think the more unexpected something is..."

"... the more there is to learn from it. In my case, what was it that made me skip down the hallway to the kitchen thinking I was fine when I’d been in a wheelchair six months earlier? It’s because I had certain optimistic expectations of myself, and I’d had results to bear out those expectations, but I’d had failures too. And I hadn’t given the failures equal weight."

Said Michael J. Fox, about breaking his arm, quoted in "Michael J. Fox on acting with Parkinson’s, taking the wrong roles and staying positive: ‘Until it’s not funny anymore, it is funny’" (NYT).

I also learned that Fox's brother-in-law is the writer Michael Pollan. Pollan's latest book is about psychedelic drugs, so the interviewer asks Fox if he's used any psychedelics. He says:

No. But one of the things that happened when I got my spinal surgery was, when I came out of the anesthetic, I was hallucinating like crazy. I thought the coat slumped on the floor against a chair was a gorilla; the floor was a miasma of swirling proteins. Really weird. So I certainly related to parts of that book. I liked the idea in the book that it’s possible that powerful psychedelic experiences are basically brain farts, but that doesn’t mean we have to devalue their importance....