Choir Notes

Life Lessons
From Music and the Spoken Word
Delivered By: Lloyd D. Newell • Program 4234

If we are open and willing to learn, life has a way of teaching us. We learn what is most important, where we should focus our energies, how we should live. We won’t get everything right—at least, not the first time—but we can grow in wisdom and experience over our life’s course.

At the age of 21, Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with ALS, a degenerative motor-neuron disease, and was told he had only a few years to live. Remarkably, nearly five decades later, this brilliant theoretical physicist, now confined to a wheelchair and able to communicate only by twitching one muscle in his right cheek, continues to write, and teach, and think. Recently an interviewer asked him what his children and grandchildren have taught him. "They have taught me that science is not enough,” he said. "I need the warmth of family life.”

Truly, science or sports or travel or career is not enough. We need the affection of loved ones, the goodness of others. And whenever we put too much emphasis on other things, life finds a way to remind us what we all know to be true: some things are more important than others.

Life lessons come to those who learn from mistakes, those who are willing to be taught. And very often the most profound insights are really the simplest. Stephen Hawking was once asked the question, "If people could take just one lesson from your work or from your life, what would you want it to be?” Of all the mysteries of science and space and the universe he could have mentioned, he simply responded, "Do your best.”1

A great mind can come to know simple things: we need warmth and love, and we just need to do our best. Those are life lessons of the most meaningful kind.

1 In "Inside a Great Mind," Parade, Sept. 12, 2010, http://www.parade.com/news/2010/09/12-inside-a-great-mind.html.