Leander Oakley

“How can I prepare for Death?
Learn how to live.
How can I learn how to live?
By preparing for Death.”
Reading those words changed my life.
I was in my early thirties working one of many obscure jobs to support my Family. This particular job involved spending long hours cooped up in a tower with a video camera. The work was as follows: Point your camera at the horses if they are going around the track and find something else to do when they aren’t.
Well they “weren’t” for about fifty minutes every hour so some people in this line of work used the time to study (there were no smart phones back then!), some used it to sleep and some wrote philosophical anecdotes on the walls.
I myself spent many hours and days pondering the quandary of those four lines in my “down” time whilst doing that job, that is how I “spent” my time.
I don’t know who wrote the above wisdom but I have since adopted it as a guiding principle in my life and it remains the foundation of my work as an End of life Doula.