If, like me, you have limited knowledge of your surroundings, perhaps you also have missed this story, the story of a Professor Randy Pausch at Carnegie Mellon University. He found out that he was dying of pancreatic cancer. In October 2007, her gave a final lecture to his students. A short time later, after more than a million viewers had seen tapes of his final lecture, he was featured on Oprah.

You and yours really should watch this. We are linking to it here:

You can see the shortened Oprah lecture and follow-up- interview
here.

You can also see the entire original lecture here. Don't click the link at work: It links to youtube.com and where I work, youtube.com is blocked).

To visit Professor Pausch's web presence at Carnegie Mellon University, go here.

To visit Randy Pausch's update page, go here.

There really is much wisdom to be gleaned from his experience. His last lecture caught the interest of some people who happened to be there and stuck with them profoundly. Having done hospice for twelve years, I can assure you that at any given moment multiple thousands of hospice patients are giving there last lecture every minute of every day. His devotion to his family and to living well in spite of facing terminal illness, while profoundly courageous and remarkable beyond words, has been done and will continue to be done as long as humanity goes on. It is wonderful that this beautifully touching and straight to the heart video has been witnessed by so many. Hopefully, we will take it's lessons into our lives.