How much time do you need?

This is a TED talk that left me with a great many lessons all at once.

The speaker, May Chen, has worked in a remarkable number of fascinating jobs (do read about them below), and this is a very important story from her talk.

Once, in an emergency room, her team had to tell a young man that his father had died. One morning his father had gone down the stairs to fetch the newspaper, fallen, and died on the spot.

He could not accept it. He said: “I knew this year that my parents were getting old, that I ought to be giving them more of my time — but I kept thinking, I STILL HAVE TIME.” And he said it over and over: if only I had known…

If he had known, would he have kept his father from going out for the paper that day, or stayed at home all day holding on to him? And the next day, and the day after that, the same?

And here is the line I love most:

「或許我們不能把生命中的每一天當成最後一天來過，但如果可以落實把重要的事情放在優先順位，那我們可以做到把生命中的最後一天，當成平凡的一天來過。」

“We may not be able to live every day of our lives as if it were the last (as Steve Jobs put it), but if we can genuinely put the things that matter first, then we can live the last day of our lives as an ordinary day.”

And very nearly, my whole extended family had a day like that with my grandmother!

May Chen

A clinical psychologist who taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point; an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), a locksmith, a bartender and a certified advanced SCUBA diver; a manager in International Human Resources at Citibank, both in Taiwan and at the New York headquarters. All of these experiences have given her different vantage points from which to observe human behaviour, in ways that keep feeding her interest in psychology and in applying it to everyday life.

https://youtu.be/snZ811wvjjw?si=JZHDTC308c7JXP5k