A kid – the age of my little brother – at the onset of teenage had a hip pain and visited the doctor. The last thing on his and his family’s mind was that he could be suffering from not just cancer but a rare form of terminal cancer. He’s a cheerful, empathetic boy who finds good in everything and has simple dreams of being with family, attending college, singing and strumming his guitar, spending time with his sisters, riding the his favorite car. Zach Sobiech, eighteen, lost his battle with cancer on 20th May 2013 while his song – Clouds, which went viral on YouTube sometime back, went on to become number one on iTunes this week! He is remembered as a rock-star by many, not just friends and family, because he brought courage, faith and determination to many lives. He wanted to be remembered, in his words, as the kid who went down fighting and did not lose. [break]
Many movies are made and books written on survival, hope, loss, strength of people from different walks of life who are diagnosed of terminal diseases or have fought to live longer. We empathize and relate to the basic human emotion of the desire to live longer when we hear such stories and we do realize how fragile life can be. Does that though materialize into us trying to “live” life? The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that most of us are trudging along from day to day in a routinely fashion; postponing what we would “really” want to do, be or feel to a future. For some reason, we envision a metamorphosis in the future. Again, for some obscure reason, we also believe that what happened with Zach and his family will not happen to us. Not that we think we’re immortal or have had water from the Fountain of Youth to drink but we still believe we are sheltered from these storms that wreck havoc. While I fail to understand the psyche behind that emotion, I know I have felt it. What does not resonate in our minds is that it’s for real and that it could just as much happen to us.
Zach’s story is not a stand alone. We’ve witnessed the amazingly arduous yet highly inspiring life of Steve Jobs who is arguably, single-handedly, responsible for making Apple the number one brand in the world today. Another heart-rendering tale is of Professor Randy Pausch who suffered from pancreatic cancer – immensely loved and respected – the author of popular Last Lecture series. His idea behind naming it the “Last lecture” was that if you had only one lecture to give before you die, what would it be!
These lives and many others that we know of personally are inspirational struggles. The one lesson that stands out is to start valuing the time we have and to use it to bring good not just to our lives but to those whose lives we touch directly or indirectly. It’s easy for me to say this, maybe because I’ve made it a mantra for myself, the sooner we embrace the fact that life is too short to live for the past gone awry or the uncertain tomorrows, we will be better off today. It’s important to live each day to its merit, take chances, stay close to your loved ones, spend time with family, to live in the moment, make a difference to a stranger’s life, explore your interests, travel and explore, be crazy, achieve your childhood dreams or enable others to achieve theirs as Prof. Pausch would say.
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I read this a couple of days back and I quote: “Imagine there is a bank account that credits your account each morning with Rs. 86,400. It carries over no balance from day to day. Every evening the bank deletes whatever part of the balance you failed to use during the day. What would you do? Draw out every cent, of course? Each of us has such a bank. Its name is time. Every morning, it credits you with 86,400 seconds. Every night it writes off as lost, whatever of this you have failed to invest to a good purpose. It carries over no balance. It allows no over draft. Each day it opens a new account for you. Each night it burns the remains of the day. If you fail to use the day’s deposits, the loss is yours. There is no drawing against “tomorrow”. You must live in the present on today’s deposits. Invest it so as to get from it the utmost in health, happiness and success. The clock is running. Make the most of today. “
Those were Zach’s final thoughts as well. He wanted to live each day – to imbibe each moment as his last. While this is a tribute to a wonderful kid who lived a short but extremely enriching life that is endearing and shattering at the same time, it’s also a lesson, to clinch the present moments and make a difference to our lives, others’ lives or both. When you seize the day (carpe diem) you live a worthy life that’s out of the ordinary and you allow life to surprise you!
The writer has the mind of a maverick and fancies challenging the limits of her thoughts.
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