It's A Big World, And I Really

It Is Technically Very Hard To Show Positive Manifestations. But I Can Look Back At The Way I Thought And Felt Even As A Little Kid And There Was A Lot Of Wonder There, And Openness To The Many Sides Of Life.

We Try, We Fail, We Posture, We Aspire, We Pontificate - And Then We Age, Shrink, Die, And Vanish.

Still, Accomplishment Is Unreliable. "succeeding," Whatever That Might Mean To You, Is Hard, And The Need To Do So Constantly Renews Itself (success Is Like A Mountain That Keeps Growing Ahead Of You As You Hike It), And There's The Very Real Danger That "succeeding" Will Take Up Your Whole Life, While The Big Questions Go Untended.

And I Have Finally Realized That, You Know, It's Not A Given That My Lifespan Will Accommodate My Writing Aspirations. It Could Be That It Would Take Me 12 More Books At Six Years Each To Get It - Which Means I Would Have To Live To Be 126. Which I Fully Intend To Do, Of Course.

When We Talk About Adversity, This Is The Moment When Character Really Gets Tested. When Things Aren't Going The Way You Want And You Can't See Anyway That They're Going To Go The Way You Want. That's Kind Of When Those Old Virtues Really Become Valuable And Vulnerable Also.