Remember my earlier posts about happiness and gratitude?
I recently ran across this cartoon:
My answer: Better than I ever imagined! (but then I'm not sure I have grown up yet).
Another item from Facebook that is related:
And yesterday, this very touching piece by Oliver Sacks appeared in the NYTimes, written after he learned he has terminal cancer. Some excerpts:
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....
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). ...
[M]y 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.
Wow. Just, wow.
[emphasis added]