I have a friend who once advised me that one should make all of one’s major life decisions in a cemetery.  I’m not sure if I entirely buy that, but I must admit that I have always been drawn to them.

Over the school April vacation, Sam and I made a trip down to the DC area via Gettysburg. I also got a chance to visit my parents gravesite at Arlington, so actually most of the time that I was not visiting with family, I was at the cemetery, It did generate some thoughts.

Sacrifice:

You can’t help but be struck by the sacrifice that past generations have made for this country. It is truly amazing and humbling. There is an amazing story of sacrifice here on one of our last trips to DC for Mom’s funeral service. A young man, just out of college killed in Vietnam just weeks about his wife’s first pregnancy.

Humility:

The Gettysburg Address is generally considered one of the jewels of American prose. The keynote speaker of the day, Edward Everet, was an amazing orator and was a Secretary of State, Congressman, Senator, President of Harvard, and Governor of Massachustts. Lincoln only spoke for two minutes at the end (Everett spoke for over 2 hours!) and most people were not even aware that he was there much less delivered a speech.

Everett wrote Lincoln a note after the speech and immediately knew what had happened. In part, he wrote:  “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

Now that’s amazing humility and recognition of that is now considered a given, but at the time, not so much.

Bronze statue of Lincoln at Gettysburg National Park

In this video, Elizabeth Gilbert speaks on creativity and how to nurture it. She challenges the notion that art and creativity has to lead to pain and suffering, and ultimately, drinking gin at 9 o’clock in the morning.

Recently, I’ve had several conversations with people about the impact of Apple’s iPad. After watching this 30 second video of Alice and Wonderland on the iPad, I finally get it! Still one of my fav Disney movies of all itme.

This is a video of a performance at TED by Natalie Merchant. From her new CD, Leave Your Sleep, that takes a group of 19th poems and sets it to music.

I just heard that a beloved young person in my orbit lost a beloved teacher. This is for you Jordy!

I bumped into a friend this past weekend and I heard that he was dealing with the death of his father. I asked him if he had ever heard of the the book The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. He had not. And since I consider this person a very well read person it surprized me. I decided to start a personal poll and ask those that I bumped into, if they had read or heard about the book. Most had not.

Randy was a dynamic professor at Carnagie Mellon who had a family with three small children when he heard that he had a particularly virulent form of cancer and only had 6 months to live.

Here’s ABC Special about  The Last Lecture and below is the actual lecture.