Rudolph E. ... graduated with three degrees, chemistry, physics, and mathematics, the latter of which he went on to complete several years of graduate and doctoral work. Well into old age, he refuses to quit living his life and go into retirement. "I've got thirty years left in me, I suppose. I may as well do something with it. You know, it's better than sitting at home watching the tube all day," he says to a friend and me after teaching a class on multivariate calculus, following a declaration of his plans to get his M.D. so he can start his own old folk's clinic, and this after losing so much of his previous business after leaving it to solve some family crisis or another, causing him to have to sell his house and much more so as to not default on his loans and remain in good credit.
Can you believe that? Let's take a typical pre-med student. Eighteen or nineteen years old, fresh out of high school, not sure what he wants to do but is throwing around the idea of becoming a doctor. He realizes that he probably will be 25 by the time he actually gets the career he wants and 30 before it starts to take off. This discourages him and he quits. Now take Rudy. He himself says he's got about 30 years left in him, if he's lucky, and now after being successful as a teacher and mathematician (upon receiving his doctorate, he was one of the top 8 people in the world who knew as much as he did about Minkowski geometry), he embarks into a very foreign world of medicine with such decisiveness that death may be the only thing to stop him.
Such tenacity inspires me like none other: to know that you will be leaving the grave no more than an empty hull when you die because you have nothing... NOTHING...left to give. That is the life worth living. I'm fortunate enough to have run into someone able to pull it off before I myself have to leave this world...
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The more we invest in life, the longer we live. Really. If this man can turn back in his very late years and look at how much time he spent in med school, he will have seen himself coming a very long way and feel that he got extra time in his life.
Also, he's probably doing his memory a favor, because they say stuff that's supposed to problem-solve in one's later years can really keep one's mind up and running for a more extended period of time than most people's. :)
I hope he makes it!
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