About a week ago, I ran into a childhood friend who just went through a battle with breast cancer. I’ve known her since the 8th grade and in those nearly 30 years (go ahead…do the math), we’ve been close and not so close depending on the timelines of each of our lives. But after all this time, when we see each other, I think we are genuinely glad to see each other because, hell, after 30 years, we are kind of part of each other at this point.
In any case, I had heard about her breast cancer about a month ago from a mutual friend and was very affected by the news. Mostly, I guess because this is a woman who is my contemporary. And certainly takes better care of herself than many of the rest of a group of friends we have from that same time. It saddened me to think that she had to go through this. And of course I started to wonder how I would handle the same challenge if faced with it.
Thankfully, she is fine. She is the poster child for early mammography (so please go and get one if you haven’t.)Treatment has gone well and now she is moving forward with the next big thing in her life. But in the path to this point, she commented on just how random her illness was. There was no history in her family and she was otherwise healthy. But when faced with an obstacle, she had to decide if the brick wall was going to stop her or if she had to find someway to go around it or over it….something she learned from Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture.
So after I got home, I went and checked out Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture on YouTube and was really moved by this man and how he is choosing to face his illness an the obstacles it presents.
I asked myself how many of us would be so brave? I’d like to think that I’d be brave for my family and friends.
But the epiphany really came as I remembered this quote from Randy Pausch, “We cannot change the cards we’re dealt but how we play the hand.”
Certainly the challenges I face in my life are not on the scale of his…or of my friend’s… but in the end, what matters is how you face those challenges. Big or small. How will you face life’s challenges?
