Privilege and adventure...........

      I cannot pretend I am without fear.  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;  I have read and traveled and thought and written.  I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
      Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

-Oliver Sacks,  as excerpted from Gratitude