I was watching the Oprah show today. She did a segment on two people living with cancer. One of them was a man named Randy Pausch a professor at Carnegie Mellon who is dying of pancreatic cancer. He has basically been told that he has 3 - 6 months to live. Could you imagine being told that you will probably die in 3 months? What is so amazing is what he decided to do with that knowledge. Instead of the self defeat, the depression, he decided that in the short time he has left he is going to teach people how to LIVE! Truely live. In his last lecture the "Childhood Dreams Lecture" he talks about keeping that "anything is possible" attitude alive. What did you really want as a child, before the noise of everyday life.
This really got me thinking about how I live my life. Am I really living? Do the people around me know how I feel about them? Lately i've been feeling like i'm just going through the motions. Eat. Sleep. School. Eat. Sleep. Will it take the revelation of a terminal illness to get me to live, here, now. Why is that what lights the fire, when you know that it's all going to end. Watching this show made me feel a little ashamed. I'm alive, and well and not really LIVING. I have all these dreams, these things i want to do...just as soon as school is done, but why am I not just doing it. Do I really let my loved ones know that they are loved? What am i grateful for? I'm ready to take my life back in an effort to realign my attitude and really be the person I want to be. One of the guests on the show said "life is a terminal illness" and it is so true! We are all guaranteed one thing in life, death. Maybe if we looked at life as some sort of sickness we're inevitably going to die from, it'll inspire us to start living our lives now.
To love, life and everything in between.
As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death - Leonardo Da Vinci
Monday, October 22, 2007
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