Gerald D'Cunha

  “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” Philip Pullman   M any of us know Admiral McRaven as the gutsy Commander, who oversaw the secret military operation of raiding the hideout of Osama Bin Laden and killing him. Some of us know him for his forthright and fearless criticism of former American President, Donald Trump. But, many, like me, know him for his inspiring speeches… Admiral McRaven is a great storyteller; by his own admission, like his father. In fact, like most men and women from the armed forces are. I have shared Admiral’s famous speech – ‘If you want to change the world, start making your bed’ – many times, before, in my Blogs. If you have missed it, here I share it again…   Today, I came across this one: “Life is all how you remember it.” How true that is! What are stories, after all? Why are they passed on from one generation to another? Today, when I heard Admiral McRaven recall...

“Stop getting distracted by things that have nothing to do with your goals.” -      Unknown E xactly a year ago, when I came home, after almost a month in the hospital (I had to undergo two surgeries, one to remove one of my kidneys which had a cancerous tumour, and the other following Pulmonary Embolism, where my lungs failed due to a blood clot), I was able to do a thing, which I wasn’t able to do for a very long time before that: to stop myself getting involved with some ‘irrelevant’ things in my life. Those things not only had nothing to do with my life goals, but had also become very, very toxic… I was getting more and more sucked into them, just because I was not able to assert myself and stay out of them. But, when I was not able to take even a single breath, leave alone a single step, while I was battling for life on my hospital bed, none of those things seemed relevant. In fact, I was able to see, so cl...