Food for Thought

This morning I received a link to a website that talks about a young woman's battle with breast cancer. I will not mention her name, as I'm not sure she wants this, but I will just say that I'm very impressed with her efforts to fight this. There are many other feelings that I have right now after reading her story: I feel empowered by her story, I feel helpless and do not want to intrude, I am angry at the health care system in this country, and also really hopeful that we will see her again in spring.

Cancer seems to be the word of the month. I guess I am one month late as October is the official cancer month. However, with the story that I just mentioned, with the one-year mark coming up since we lost our godfather to lung cancer, and my reading Randy Pausch's book "The Last Lecture", November is the cancer month, at least in my mind.

For those of you who haven't heard of Randy Pausch, he was a Carnegie Mellon professor who relentlessly fought a two-year battle with pancreatic cancer. Once he found out he could not beat it, he focused on the things that really matter to him: having fun, spending time with his family, and building memories with and for his very young kids. From his determination to do all this before he said goodbye, came three amazing things: 1) the famous (by now) Last Lecture he gave to his students, friends, and family at Carnegie Mellon; 2) the book The Last Lecture, which was published in 35 languages already and combines fragments from his talks, plus some more of his thoughts and advice, and 3) the Time Management Lecture, which is…self-explanatory. Unfortunately, Randy Pausch lost his battle in July of this year. His legacy – if there’s any consolation – remains to influence people.

It is interesting to me how when we hear stories like Randy’s or the young woman’s, we sort of wake up and see the important things in life. But then we gradually slip back to the same old routine and feeling that “this is not going to happen to me”. And yours truly is guilty as charged. I wonder what it takes to make us not forget! And I am not talking about living with the fear of a fatal diagnosis. I’m talking about putting things into perspective and learning from other people’s stories. What I learned from these stories is this:
• Be optimistic.
• If you can change it, deal with it.
• Live today like it’s your last day (we have all heard this before, but how many of us do it?) • Treat the cause, not the symptoms.
• Decide what’s important to you, early in life, and then focus on that. Randy Pausch and others call this the 80-20 rule: 80% of your satisfaction/happiness (fill in the blanks) comes from 20% of your life. So figure out what the 20% is.
And my favorite (Randy Pausch’s dad’s words, which also remind me a lot of my own dad):
• “Just because you’re in the driver’s seat doesn’t mean you have to run people over.”

This is not meant to make you sad. It’s meant to be a nudge to wake up and smell the roses. You know what they say, if you can’t pay it back, pay it forward ;).