Depois de um dia corrido finalmente consegui sentar para postar hoje!
Estão todos bem? Espero que sim. Eu estou pensativa a respeito de uma reportagem super emocionante sobre esse senhor
Vejam:
O escritor e professor da Escola de Medicina da Universidade de Nova York afirma no artigo, intitulado “Minha própria vida”, que se sentia saudável até um mês atrás, quando foi diagnosticada uma metástase no fígado.
O cientista conta que, há nove anos, tratou de um raro melanoma ocular que tinha apenas 2% de chance de sofrer uma metástase _e ele está neste grupo. “Minha sorte acabou.”
No texto, sóbrio e poético, Sacks diz se sentir grato por ter tido “nove anos de boa saúde e produtividade desde o diagnóstico original". "Mas agora estou de cara com a morte”, afirma.
E segue: “Depende de mim escolher como quero viver os meses que me restam. Tenho que viver da maneira mais rica, profunda e produtiva que puder”.
O autor de livros de não ficção de sucesso como “Tempo de Despertar” e “O Homem que Confundiu sua Mulher com um Chapéu” diz que se sente “intensamente vivo” e conta o que quer, no tempo que lhe resta: "Aprofundar minhas amizades, dizer adeus aos que amo, escrever mais, viajar”.
Segundo ele, tentará acertar as contas com o mundo e, também, se divertir e fazer algumas bobagens.
Sacks diz que está focado: “Não há tempo para nada não essencial. Tenho de me concentrar em mim mesmo, meu trabalho, meus amigos”. Notícias sobre política ou aquecimento global não terão mais sua atenção. Explica: “Estes não são mais meus problemas; eles pertencem ao futuro”.
Encerra reafirmando que seu sentimento predominante não é o medo, mas de gratidão. “Acima de tudo, tenho sido um ser senciente, um animal pensante, neste lindo planeta, o que tem sido um enorme privilégio e aventura”.
Por
QSocial, com informações do “New York Times”
*Este texto faz parte do projeto Geração Experiência, que tem como objetivo mostrar histórias de pessoas com mais de 60 anos que são inspiração para outras de qualquer idade.
A MONTH ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. Although the radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye, only in very rare cases do such tumors metastasize. I am among the unlucky 2 percent.
I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.
It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”
“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he wrote. “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.”
I have been lucky enough to live past 80, and the 15 years allotted to me beyond Hume’s three score and five have been equally rich in work and love. In that time, I have published five books and completed an autobiography (rather longer than Hume’s few pages) to be published this spring; I have several other books nearly finished.
Hume continued, “I am ... a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions.”
Here I depart from Hume. While I have enjoyed loving relationships and friendships and have no real enmities, I cannot say (nor would anyone who knows me say) that I am a man of mild dispositions. On the contrary, I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.
And yet, one line from Hume’s essay strikes me as especially true: “It is difficult,” he wrote, “to be more detached from life than I am at present.”
Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.
On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.
This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well).
I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming
This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.
I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
Por isso que devemos aproveitar da melhor forma possível cada segundo da nossa vida como se fosse o último!
E você? Como anda aproveitando sua vida? Fica aqui a pergunta para uma possível reflexão.
