EMAIL #60 - 26th, February, 2020 - WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE
Hi Everyone,
David has asked me to send out this week’s weekly email.
David and I spoke about some ideas I could write about like ‘’not taking life too seriously’’ and ‘’how to treat people ‘’ etc.
After thinking about this I came to the realisation that those two topics and many more like them are all in a book I am currently reading. The book I am reading is the autobiography of an amazing person who I admire a lot, and that admiration is only growing stronger as I read through his life journey. The autobiography is Neale Danihers, When All Is Said and Done. Neale was a country kid who grew up on a family farm in an NSW town called Ungarie, with his parents and 10 brothers and sisters!! He was an amazing young AFL talent who captained Essendon at 22 years old, yet his career was cut short due to multiple knee reconstructions.
Most of you will know Neale as the bloke dying from MND, and the amazing work he has done and continues to do in raising millions of dollars to find a cure for this hideous disease he calls ‘’the beast’’. But if you read this book you will, as I am, learn about the life he had before being diagnosed, which results into how he deals with this misfortune with the attitude, humility and vulnerability every day. Neale is fully aware that MND will kill him eventually as it does to millions of people within the first two years of being diagnosed. But Neale’s life mission is to raise as much money as possible so that one day long after he is gone there will be a cure for others. That is extremely selfless and sums up the person he is, and one of the first quotes in his book ‘’society grows when old men plant trees, whose shade they know they shall never sit in”, anonymous Greek Proverb.
Neale speaks of putting life into perspective, and that if we are born in Australia, in reality we have already won the lottery. A billion people would love to have the start in life that we get, yet we can’t believe our misfortune when the internet goes down or we lose our phone, yet we are not born in a little shanty in a village with no clean water and parents who earn $2 a week. Life doesn’t promise to be fair, just ask Josh about his resent experience building homes for the needy in Cambodia.
There are two things in Neale’s book that really resonated with me so far, one is he tells a story of a leading neurologist and psychiatrist form Austria Viktor Frankl, who in 1942 because of his Jewish faith was sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis. He spent the next three years forced into slave labour and had to watch on as the deaths of his wife, parents and brother took place during the Holocaust. Frank was liberated by American soldiers in 1945 and lived to 92 years old, writing books inspiring generations of humanistic psychologists.
He is quoted as saying "everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way’’. The other thing that really resonated with me is the following core value that Neale lives by "after all that’s said and done, more is said than done’’ Aesop, ‘’Ancient Greek storyteller’’. I personally think there is so much to think about when you read that short sentence, whether its family, friends, work or just life in general, at the end of the day we are measured by what we do, opposed to what we think, feel or say we are going to do, at the end of the day actions will always speak louder than words.
Thanks for reading. I hope there was something in there that resonated with you, and I can’t recommend this autobiography any higher. I am nearly finished and will place it in the office library when done.
Cheers Lyle.
