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It was sad but inspiring to read the article - reproduced in newspapers yesterday - by the neurologist Oliver Sacks, once described by the New York Times as “the poet laureate of medicine”. In it, he announces eloquently that he has incurable cancer, and months to live. “My luck,” he says, “has run out.” Professor Sacks is celebrated as a pioneer who worked on some of the far borderlands of neurology, helping patients with conditions such as autism, epilepsy and Alzheimer’s. But his work became known more widely when his book Awakenings was turned into an acclaimed feature film. It told the amazing story of a group of patients he worked with in the late Sixties, who’d been in a catatonic state since contracting “Sleepy Sickness” in the 1920s. He tried an experimental drug on one of them, who awoke for the first time since childhood. Each of the patients then in turn effectively, as he puts it, came back to life. Sadly, in time, they developed resistance to the drug and slipped back into catatonia. But not before they had lived again; and profound lessons had been learned. ‘What both the movie and the book convey,’ wrote one film critic at the time, ‘is the courage of the patients and the profound experience of their doctors, as ... they re-experienced what it means to be born, to open your eyes and discover to your astonishment that "you" are alive.” Awakening is such a vital first step of any spiritual journey. As Anthony de Mello once wrote, “The great tragedy of life is not how much we suffer but how much we miss. Humans are born asleep, live asleep and die asleep. This is what spirituality is about: waking up.” There are echoes for me here with Jesus’ words to Nicodemus, that “You must be born again.” Professor Sack’s article arrives, then, as a most poignant wake-up to any of us who might be sleep-walking our way through life. “It is up to me now,” he writes, “to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live,” he says, “in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.” “I cannot pretend I am without fear,” he concludes. “But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return.” He has. And we owe it, don’t we, to people like him, who’ve lived well, and are willing to share first-hand their brave attempt to die well too, to open our eyes today and be astonished that we are alive. First broadcast on Monday 21 February 2015