When the end is near ....

While browsing the net I found this interesting article in NY Times.

This article reminded me of the book Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom which I read sometime back. This book tells story of Morrie , a retired professor who one day discovers that he does n't have many days to live and his lessons to the author who is a former pupil.
The author is busy with professional life when he gets to know about the professor's condition and decides to pay him a visit. The one visit turns out to be a weekly flight to Morrie's home where each time Morrie has lessons on life for the author.These visits have a profound effect on the author. It is a thought provoking book and touches your heart.
Another book on a similar genre is "Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life" by former CEO of KPMG Eugene O'Kelly . At 53 he was living a very busy lifestyle of CEO having very little time for himself and his family when he finds out he has cancer and has few months to live.(reminds me of the hindi movie Anand)
He decides to plan his death and the few months he had on his side. He decides that he will meet all his friends who were near and far and meet them once for final time and "unwind" .
In the book he says that all his life focussed on building and planning for the future .Now was the turn for him to learn the true value of the present.
These books and the article reflect how knowledge of death transforms a person and gives him one last chance to introspect....

Coming back to the news article here is a excerpt from the lecture which I really liked.
"OK, let’s talk about football. My dream was to play in the National Football League. And most of you don’t know that I actually – no. [laughter] No, I did not make it to the National Football League, but I probably got more from that dream and not accomplishing it than I got from any of the ones that I did accomplish. I had a coach, I signed up when I was nine years old. I was the smallest kid in the league, by far. And I had a coach, Jim Graham, who was six-foot-four, he had played linebacker at Penn State. He was just this hulk of a guy and he was old school. And I mean really old school. Like he thought the forward pass was a trick play. [laughter] And he showed up for practice the first day, and you know, there’s big hulking guy, we were all scared to death of him. And he hadn’t brought any footballs. How are we going to have practice without any footballs? And one of the other kids said, excuse me coach, but there’s no football. And Coach Graham said, right, how many men are on a football field at a time? Eleven on a team, twenty-two. Coach Graham said, all right, and how many people are touching the football at any given time? One of them. And he said, right, so we’re going to work on what those other twenty-one guys are doing. And that’s a really good story because it’s all about fundamentals. Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals. You’ve got to get the fundamentals down because otherwise the fancy stuff isn’t going to work. And the other Jim Graham story I have is there was one practice where he just rode me all practice.You’re doing this wrong, you’re doing this wrong, go back and do it again, you owe me, you’re doing push-ups after practice. And when it was all over, one of the other assistant coaches came over and said, yeah, Coach Graham rode you pretty hard, didn’t he? I said, yeah. He said, that’s a good thing. He said, when you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore, that means they gave up. And that’s a lesson that stuck with me my whole life. Is that when you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a very bad place to be. Your
critics are your ones telling you they still love you and care."