Enjoy Every Sandwich: Living Each Day as If It Were Your Last by Lee Lipsenthal

December Book: Enjoy Every Sandwich: Living Each Day as If It Were Your Last by Lee Lipsenthal

Lee Lipsenthal is one of those characters that you wish you’d had the chance to meet. A dedicated husband and dad, and a good doctor. His story is an honest biography of a humble man who has learned to overcome the limits of his personality, like depression and anxiety, through meditation, mindfulness and mystic experiences.

When he had been diagnosed with cancer, Lee began an introspective and spiritual journey that lead him to conquer absolute inner peace and the courage to face death with serenity. This book’s uniqueness consists in managing to express the beauty of life in simple truths that we can all see if we are willing to work on our best version of ourselves.

His story is a quick reading, it took me one single day to finish it. Be sure you have a pen and piece of paper nearby, as it leaves space for a lot of reflections.

I find this reading ideal for those who are struggling to accept death and in the end, as Lee suggests, accept life.

My favorite quotes and paragraphs are:

Most important, I began to learn that the goal was not in the doing but in the being.

After these past-life experiences and as I studied further, I realized that today’s science is just a collection of theories about what the world, life, and the universe might be, not what it is. We are cavemen waiting for fire. We are Newtonian physicists waiting for Einstein.
As someone who has done medical research, I know that research can answer questions only on the basis of our limited ability to think of those questions. It’s an interesting game but a game nonetheless. We can identify trends that support our ideas, but that’s all we can do. With this in mind, fearing death is simply fearing that which we do not understand. This fear makes no sense to me. Why should I spend whatever time I have left worrying about what might happen after I die? I am open to finding out what, if anything, lies beyond this life.

We laughed about an institute of health that spends billions of dollars annually studying disease but spends virtually nothing studying what makes people happy and vital. The National Institutes of Health doesn’t really study health at all; it studies disease. Perhaps the NIH should be called the National Institute of Avoiding the Inevitable.
The shadowy parts of our character will still show up when we least desire them and when we most need to learn from them.