Tomorrow is my 69th birthday. Like the old monk who, having for years copied old texts from previous copies and finally wanting to check against the original, is found sobbing as he leans over the original book and tearfully mumbles, "The word is celebrate not celibate", I am more inclined to contemplate rather than celebrate this occasion.
There have been moments in my life when I thought I would never get this far. Now that I have, I wonder how much of it was simply fortuitous happenstance. As I wrote elsewhere, "Somehow I've got this far! Sometimes it seemed like driving a car at night. I could see only as far as the headlights, I couldn't see where I was going and very little of what I passed along the way, but somehow I managed to make the whole trip all the same."
Robert Frost's poem sums it all up rather well:
