| Time | Text |
|---|---|
|
Deciding in High School
00:02:26
|
|
| I am so emotional that I had to figure out how not to have it overwhelm me. | |
| Wow. | |
| Yeah, I know. | |
| It is a wow because I'm so rational. | |
| So I'll give you an example. | |
| I watched The Diary of Anne Frank when I was 17 on television. | |
| It choked me up beyond words. | |
| And I said, how am I going to deal with this? | |
| I'm overwhelmed with sadness about the Holocaust. | |
| And not just the Holocaust. | |
| Evil and unjust suffering generally. | |
| And so what I decided already in high school, I made most of my big decisions in high school, interestingly. | |
| I decided... | |
| That what I would do is channel my emotions into action. | |
| And that way I feel I'm doing something about what I feel so strongly about. | |
| Does this all make sense? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| And so it was a very conscious decision. | |
| To substitute reason for passion. | |
| The passions are still there. | |
| But I have channeled them, it's the best term I guess, into fighting and into reason. | |
| So I just wanted to say that I really, I did fear, to a certain extent I did fear. | |
| That my emotions would get the better of me. | |
| I'll tell you what, emotions. | |
| Sadness over human suffering. | |
| That's the emotion. | |
| I've come to see death a little differently, and it's because of my faith in God. | |
| When I was in Europe this summer, I was in Ireland for a little bit, and I met this beautiful girl, 23 years old, named Eleanor. | |
|
A Mother's Peace
00:02:31
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|
| She's a dressmaker. | |
| She's just stunning. | |
| So dignified and beautiful. | |
| And she told me that her mother died two weeks. | |
| Before I met her of cancer. | |
| And she handed me a little prayer card, which is very common in Ireland, to have a little prayer card of her mother. | |
| And she had these tears sitting on the edge of her eyes, her beautiful blue eyes. | |
| And I was just so captivated by her because she never let them fall down, but you could just see her heart was broken. | |
| And I said to her, Eleanor, how are you... | |
| How are you out in the world after your mother died? | |
| And she said, But this priest said to her, | |
| the human lifespan is so short. | |
| Think about the span of eternity. | |
| Think about all of the thousands of years that human beings have been on this earth. | |
| And then we each individually come for 50 to 70 years. | |
| Let's hope. | |
| 50 to 100 years. | |
| And this priest said, that is a blip on the radar screen of time. | |
| That is a... | |
| Our earthly minds can't conceptualize it, but it is a tiny, tiny bit of time in the span of eternity. | |
| And this priest said to her, it will be faster than the speed of light in the span of time until you're reunited with your family again. | |
| I believe that. | |
| I really believe that too. | |
| And it was this girl telling this to me and I could see that she really believed it. | |
| And it was what allowed her mother to have peace in her death. | |
| It was what allowed her to have peace through her mother's death. | |
| And that permanently changed the way that I view it. | |
| Is that how you view it? | |
| Oh, totally. | |
| I said my sanity preserver is the afterlife. | |
| Well, you know, I... Not just for my reconnection with loved ones, that God judges the bad and rewards the good. | |
| That's my sanity. | |