Have you seen Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch's "Last Lecture?" It's a YouTube hit, and an appearance on "Oprah" and a feature article in The Wall Street Journal have served to spread his story even further. Professor Pausch has pancreatic cancer and a matter of months--or weeks to live. He imparts his life lessons on his audience, but more importantly his two young sons and baby daughter for whom the lecture was really intended.
The Oprah version is best, but if you can't access it there, see below.
Every time I watch this, I'm moved. Here's someone whose contributions to the human race we should be celebrating (and be reading about in the news versus those starlets whose life stories about which we know way too much).
I've been thinking about this lately as I've seen different speakers in different venues for work or social reasons. They all tell great stories, and I usually leave inspired. But I've noticed that those stories and the lessons contained within them often fade as quickly as they came when I'm back in the grind of day-to-day living.
So I ask myself after watching Professor Pausch's moving lecture another time, would I really let my four-year-old draw on the walls? I don't have kids yet, so I guess I'll find out some day down the road...hopefully at that point I'll remember this man's anecdote about his own childhood imagination played out on his bedroom walls and be encouraged to let junior do the same.
Comments welcome!
Cheers,
Jacquie
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2 comments:
Would I let my children draw on the wall? Probably not. I would provide the tools necessary so that they could express themselves. I have watched the "Last Lecture" and it does provide a powerful message. Much like yourself, I also get wrapped up in the day to day grind and alas, the message fades. Where is the message that can survive the short attention span of our generation? What is truth? Where is God? How long is eternity? Why do people die? Is there justice? When did time begin? Who knows? Questions take us nowhere. They are paths leading into darkness, caves from which no one emerges.
We’re all lost……all accident victims on the bloody highway of life. We’re all parachutists whose ripcord has come loose in our hands, the map-like surface of the earth hurtling like a huge hammer up against us………this is life.
Sounds a lot like something my dad would say...."life's hard and then you die," also a favorite quote of my sixth grade science teacher...
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