The gift......................

"...knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God
ever gives us.
    "It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes.  It is so easy to take for granted the pale new growth on an evergreen, the sheen of the limestone on Fifth Avenue, the color of our kids' eyes, the way the melody in a symphonyrises and falls and disappears and rises again.  It is so easy to exist instead of live.  Unless you know there is a clock ticking. So many of us changed our lives when we heard the biological clock and decided to have kids.  But that sound is a murmur compared to the tolling of mortality."

-Anna Quindlen, A Short Guide to a Happy Life

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