This post comes with a warning label: it's intended to make you grateful, but it might also make you sad. (It does both to me.) Proceed at your own discretion.
From On Not Knowing How to Live by Allen Wheelis: "One day, a day lying in wait up ahead, you will lie abed in a hospital, writhe in nausea from chemotherapy, feel the metastases spreading out in your bones, hair falling in bunches from the radiation - and what then will seem to you to have been the way to live? Does the dark-haired beauty still beckon? Do you strain to follow, to reach out, to touch? Or do you yearn rather but to walk on the beach in the sun, to sit down to dinner with a friend, or perhaps just to be free of pain - all those riches which are now right at hand and ignored?"
From On Not Knowing How to Live by Allen Wheelis: "One day, a day lying in wait up ahead, you will lie abed in a hospital, writhe in nausea from chemotherapy, feel the metastases spreading out in your bones, hair falling in bunches from the radiation - and what then will seem to you to have been the way to live? Does the dark-haired beauty still beckon? Do you strain to follow, to reach out, to touch? Or do you yearn rather but to walk on the beach in the sun, to sit down to dinner with a friend, or perhaps just to be free of pain - all those riches which are now right at hand and ignored?"
3 Comments:
One of your other posts says that you would rather not want to want something you can't have. So if you are sick, wouldn't you want to not want to be out in the sun or enjoying time with friends so that you don't feel even more unhappy with what you can't have?
By aem, at 10:17 AM
Yes. If there was something I couldn't do, I wouldn't want to want to do it, because for me (and most others) desires which are knowingly unachievable are a negative. Of course, wanting to want something doesn't necessarily mean you will want it… in other words, we have only a very limited ability for our second-order desires to control our first-order desires. If I were bedridden and had only a few weeks or months to live, I think I would have very little ability to choose to not want all the wonderful things that I have access to right now, and that's why it's so important to not take them for granted now while I'm still able to enjoy them.
By howtolive.org, at 8:36 AM
Yesterday I saw a movie called Wit and it reminded me of this post. Emma Thompson as a cancer patient. If this post made you feel more grateful than sad then check this movie out, otherwise don't.
By Anonymous, at 12:45 PM
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