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SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Friday February 20 2015, @11:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the sieze-every-day dept.

Oliver Sacks, a professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine and the author of many books, has a beautifully written op-ed in the NYT where he reflects on his own mortality and the fact that at 81 he is faced with terminal cancer and a few months left to live. Some excerpts:

"I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight. It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.

My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and travelled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

 
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by SecurityGuy on Friday February 20 2015, @05:39PM

    by SecurityGuy (1453) on Friday February 20 2015, @05:39PM (#147486)

    No, not at all. At a certain point, though, you have to let go of solving the world's problems and resign yourself that someone else is going to have to do that. When you have terminal cancer and not a lot of time left, I think it's entirely reasonable to accept that you, personally, are not going to have a significant impact on global warming, curing cancer, or any of the other things we promise ourselves we'll do or be part of when we're young.

    He's not a douche, he's just a guy who realized he's no longer answering the question "What am I going to do with my life?" He's answering "What will I do with tomorrow?"

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