麻豆约拍

In the 1990 film Awakenings, the late Robin Williams played the British-born professor and author Oliver Sacks.听 Sacks is a tall, powerful man and Williams described him as 鈥榩art Albert Schweitzer part Arnold Schwarzenegger.鈥櫶�听 Last week Oliver Sacks wrote movingly in The New Yorker on learning he had terminal cancer.

鈥淚t is difficult to be more detached from life than I am at present鈥�, Sacks explained, 鈥淚 feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at 鈥楴ewsHour鈥� every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming... This is not indifference but detachment.鈥�

I am not suffering from a terminal illness, other than the terminus all humans are journeying towards, but I can empathise with Sacks.

I have spoken before about my daughter who was diagnosed with an illness that, although not terminal, can be fatal. Though I have tried to maintain a semblance of normality in my life, I have become more and more detached from the world. There has been no time for anything inessential. There have been only two things which have mattered through these long, long months: faith, family, and friends; and even these have been tested.

I have gone from someone who worked long hours鈥攑lugged into news, and current affairs, with their finger on the so called pulse; to someone rather disengaged from the world. It is not that I don鈥檛 care. It is not that I don鈥檛 feel. It is just there has been no room for anything else in my brain, and in my heart.

After seven and a half months in hospital my daughter is home again. She is not fully recovered. But she is in a much better place than she was last year. I feel gratitude. I also feel the responsibility to re-engage with life, although I find that I am changed.

When we strip our lives down, there are few things which genuinely matter. Perhaps the art of happiness is working out what they are. One shouldn鈥檛 have to wait for an illness to find that out, but as is so often the case we are distracted by many things, until tribulation causes us to find a different perspective.