Different Path to The Same Destiny?

I am a big fan of National Geographic (both the magazine and the TV channel). As soon as the May 2010 issue arrives this afternoon, I read it almost like cover-to-cover, as at the bottom cover is the advertisement showing the sexy iPad without a word on it! Yeah! This product may need no word to promote it. How cool!

Inside this issue, there are quite a few interesting story, in page 74, titled "The Secrets to Sleep" by D. T. Max, subtitled "From birth, we spend a third of our lives asleep, After decades of research, we're still not sure why." Life is a misery, so as (some parts of) the human body are a miseries! Fatal Familial Insomnia (FFI) is a genetic disease. As it's name suggests, the main symptom of FFI is the inability to sleep. "First the ability to nap disappears, then the ability to get a full night's sleep, until the patient cannot sleep at all. The syndrome usually strikes when the sufferer is in his or her 50s, ordinarily lasts about a year, and, as the name indicates, always ends in death." Although "FFI is exceedingly rare, known in only 40 families worldwide", I personally find this scary, imagine one cannot sleep for one year!

Since the day I am diagnosed with cancer, I received various emails and information regarding the causes of different type of cancers. No matter how exhaustive is the information, there are still no logical answer to my "sudden sickness", and this initiates a lot of my family and friends to ask the big question "why?" or "why me?" and it is obvious that I cannot offer them with any ... well ... sensible/logical answer. What's more important is that "I did not ask this question myself", not then and not now. I usually would add a comment that "if you are around long enough, you should be aware that there are plenty of more questions in life that we are unable to find the answer to the "why?" and "why me?" questions. I hope you can pause for a few minutes and think this through, and come to the SAME conclusion as me. Then, rather than keep asking "why?" and "why me?", I very much would like you to focus on the "here and now", i.e. just over this question stage and move immediate to what you can do here and now.

Then, once you are able to grab the Here & Now, you may consider to move to the next level of the Life & Death question, and it would not be difficult for you to find out "though we may go through different paths, our destiny is the same!" ... By now, I hope you would sense the internal peace inside you. No matter what questions you asked (and what answers you found or provided with), and it would good if you can hold onto the Here & Now, the internal peace you are able to find is when you can accept no matter which path we walk or choose to walk, the destiny is going to the same. Whether if you have FFI inside your family genetic (which only about 40 families in the whole world) or cancer (which usually one third of the total population will die from this)!

[This photo was taken during a landing into Vancouver Airport by me luckily sitting in a window sit and the the window was without scratches on it. The weather that day was very nice and I was so proud of this photo that I sent it to the National Geographic magazine hoping that it will publish it! ... It didn't happen, and it's okay!]