Three Life Lessons From a Dying Man

One of my favorite jokes I’ve ever heard was delivered to me by a terminally ill man. He knew I was looking for a serving job, so I could quit as a retirement home night-cook and go back to school.

“I was looking in the classifieds today,” he said. “I saw something that would be perfect for you. The pay isn’t great, but the tips(чаевые) are huge!”

“Oh yeah, Hank? What job?”

“Circumcising(обрезание...то самое) elephants at the Denver Zoo!” Hank said, proceeding to cackle(продолжая хихикать) until his hacking cough(отрывистый кашель) came back. After the fit, his wife pleasantly chastised(отругала) him for being crass(грубый), and my half-hour lunch break was over.

When I met Hank, he was dying of lung cancer. He brought up that fact exactly one time, to tell me that it was out of his control. In his own words:

“What am I going to do, start getting pissed off(злиться) now? Every other time I’ve gotten pissed off it hasn’t helped me a damn bit.” Then he launched into one of his stories, of another time he was pissed off when he thought he was going to die in a malfunctioning(отказавший) plane. He put the anger away and landed.

“Life is like that,” he told me. “No matter how pissed off you are, you still have to land the plane, and being pissed off isn’t going to help you one bit. You’ve got to make the best of it.”

The day he taught me this lesson was the same day he made a joke about elephant circumcision and laughed himself hoarse.

Here are three lessons that I took from Hank:

1. Life (and the world) is a malfunctioning(неисправгный) plane, the more pissed off we let ourselves become about it, the more likely we are to crash.
2. Happiness is not a consumable(потребляемый) product. It is not something you find by searching for it. It is a naturally arising byproduct(естественно возникающий побочный продукт) of a fulfilling, well-lived life.
3. A well-lived life has more to do with perspective than anything else. As long as you can laugh, there is hope.

These are crazy times, but our generation does not have a monopoly on challenges. The modern world simply presents new challenges. Our battles are not unwinnable, or insurmountable, no matter how daunting they may seem. If we let the world make us bitter, we have lost the fight. If we approach our challenges with joy, nothing can stop us.