A couple of events recently give me pause for reflection.
The first is an annual fundraiser held on ESPN to support the Jimmy V foundation. This is an organization to support cancer research founded by Jim Valvano. If you don’t know him, he was a college basketball coach in the 80’s coaching NC State to a miraculous win over Houston for the National Championship. He died of cancer in 1993. Shortly before he died, he set up this foundation with ESPN. Here is the speech he gave at the 1993 ESPY awards when he won the Arthur Ashe Humanitarian award. WARNING: This is a tear jerker http://youtube.com/watch?v=8neQJlTvMSs. If you have had a bad day and need a pick me up, just watch this speech. I actually met him once at a bar in Charlottesville, VA. He really lit up a room and joked with me like we had been friends for years. He was quite an extraordinary person.
The other event was the passing of Randy Pausch. Professor Pausch inspired millions with his speech called “Achieving your Childhood Dreams” AKA “The Last Lecture”. Professor Pausch recently lost his battle with Pancreatic cancer. His lecture and book tell us how to live our dreams and to appreciate life.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo It’s an 1:15 long so be sure and have time to watch the whole thing.
It is amazing to me how these men could face death with such life. They are a lesson to all of us who look at the current times with such pessimism and dread. They teach us to embrace every day as if it were your last. As Jim Valvano reminds us, we should try every day to laugh, to think, and to cry. “If you do that, you’ve had a full day.” If each of us lived like that we wouldn’t have time to worry about the price of gas, or the value of our home, or wars thousands of miles away. They remind us to take each relationship and treat it as if it were the most important. To enjoy the time with others, appreciate the gifts and the times we have, and to perceiver through adversity.
While the media and wall street try to tell us we are living in such turbulent and dangerous times, I remind myself how lucky we are to live in times of such opportunity. Every generation has had its doomsday. We are no different. I remind myself I have never suffered through a depression, I never had to have a fallout shelter buried in my yard, and I have never had to fight in a war. That’s pretty lucky compared to the generations that have preceded me. Our lives are what we decide them to be. We must decide to see what is good and what each of us can do to make it better. Don’t get me wrong, I know there are bad things all over this world. My point is they have always been there, and they always will be there. Each of us just need to keep a little more perspective and enjoy and improve what we already have.
