Do you have a sense of urgency

Have you read Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn? It is one of my favorite books.

I will not narrate the book, because I would mangle it. It would be equivalent to trying to explain all human emotions and their nuances. When I open this book, I do not read the words, I feel them.

I would like to describe only one character in this story of cancer and humanity.

One of the cancer patients in the ward is Vadim, and his story is included in the chapter Approaching the Speed of Light. Vadim was a young, 27-year old geologist diagnosed with melanoma. He was well aware of his fate: back then, everyone with melanoma died. It was rare for melanoma patients to survive a year.

After finding out his own fate with certainty, the guy developed an acute sense of urgency that propelled him into action before it was too late. Here is how Solzhenitsyn describes Vadim:

He became like a moving body approaching the speed of light. His “time” and his “mass” were becoming different from these of other people. His time was increasing in capacity, his mass in penetration. His years were being compressed into weeks, his days into minutes. All his life he’d been in a hurry, but now he was really starting to run. Any fool can become a doctor of science if he lives sixty years in peace and quiet. But what can one do in twenty-seven?

Twenty-seven had been Lermontov’s age. Lermontov hadn’t wanted to die either. … Still, Lermontov had carved himself a niche in our memory not just for a hundred years, but forever.

… Vadim had discovered an important and at first glance paradoxical point: a man of talent can understand and accept death more easily than a man with none – yet the former has more to lose. A man of no talent craves long life, yet Epicurus had once observed that a fool, if offered eternity, would not know what to do with it.

…Throughout his twenty-six years he had found no greater fulfillment, no more satisfying and harmonious feeling than the consciousness of time usefully spent. This, he thought, would be the most sensible way to spend his last months.

Do we have Vadim's sense of urgency? 

Or do we develop this sense only when it is too late? 

Remember that TODAY happens only once.

As the clock marks a new year, I wish you to develop a sense of urgency and purpose.  I wish you the consciousness of time usefully spent. 

Know where you are going.

I wish the same to myself.