On "The Last Lecture"

I have always felt that the gravity of the message of death is what it tells us about life. This morning I finally read The Last Lecture, the book based on the lecture by computer science professor Randy Pausch at Carnegie Mellon University. A month before the lecture, he was told that he had no more than six months to live after the return of spreading pancreatic cancer, and he took on the lecture in part as a legacy for his three young children. Word got around of the lecture on Youtube, leading eventually to the book, where the ideas are extended with the help of co-author Jeffrey Zaslow.

It is impossible to read the book without rethinking the importance of how we spend our time, and what imprint we can leave. It struck me that a terminal disease has inspired the author to ensure that he leaves his children with a tangible sense of who he was. Yet we all know that life is terminal: not having a deadline we easily neglect the value of the moment. The Last Lecture is a great read, but I take two things away from it: first, to make the most of the moment, and second, to leave some evidence of who we are and will have been.