really sorry to hear about this. no one deserves to die that young.
In my last year of working in hospitals, a horrific car accident on a high way ended the lives of a few young doctors who I had worked with.
The very next morning after the accident, I got a call from one of my friends. I was oblivious to what happened the night before. She was crying, and I couldn’t really understand her. It was not really her to cry. I was trying to make out what she was saying.
At the time I blanked my mind, and had very little time to digest it. In fact, I was just having a conversation with one of the doctors who passed away the day before the accident. He recently got engaged.
As doctors we deal with death on a daily basis - filling out cremation forms and certifying the dead in front of their families. But when it happens to someone you know like that, it’s different. What struck me so hard at the time, was that it could be any one of
us, at any time. Accidents do happen.
However, it’s another when a person’s life is deliberately taken away from them.
Recently we’ve been seeing a rise in knife crime in the UK. It’s disgusting. UK magistrates responded by handing new guidelines by Guindelines Council regarding knife crime, increasing the terms in prison to something like 12 weeks. 12 weeks? It’s a slap on the wrist. I was recently out visiting friends in LA/Santa Monica and it was a completely different reality to them.
Anyway the changes are a start, but this probably isn’t going to change much. The problem is not not the ‘knife’ part. It’s the ‘crime’ part. Taking knives away is just pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom of it. What they really need to do is to target what’s going on in the heads of these teenagers. Change their influences. And fix them.
I want to share a quote from Steve Jobs that may put things in more perspective better than anything I could write. You've all probably heard of the Stanford Commencement speech he made - if not check it out on youtube:
“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Part of the reason why I decided to 'bag it all' and pursue what i want do. Foolish, maybe, but I love every moment of my life right now
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