Monday, January 26, 2009

What would you do, if you know your time won't be long..

During the Christmas and New year holiday, I finally have time to spend my time to read for pleasure again. By coincidence the two books that I read this time related to death. One of them is a fiction another one is real story. Having read both of them, I come to realise that we have to appreciate every minutes and every second in this life. Life is so short, instead of complaining, why don't we focus on thing that we can do to fulfil our dreams. The following is the title and short description of the book:
  • Ways to live forever. This book was written by a young talented author Sally Nicholls. She was just 23 when she wrote the book. The book describes an 11 years old boy, who may not make his dream come true because he would die by lymphoblastic leukemia. With the encouragement of his tutor, he starts to write a bit about himself, then more, until he is using his writing to sort out his death.
  • The last lecture (Real Story). A lot of professors give talks titled The Last Lecture. Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy? When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. What would a dying person give in a lecture? suprisingly Randy did not talk about his health condition and his family struggles to cope with the situation, instead he talked about how to achieve childhood dreams, overcoming obstacles, enabling dreams of others, and seizing every moment (because time is all you have and you may find one day that you have less than you think). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living. This lecture recorded as one of the most inspiring lecture ever.

No comments: