My youth, my young adulthood, my maturity, and even the beginning of my old age were all lost to me in a maddening rush of self imposed safety-isolation, because I was deceived, for all that time, that my "I" was an internal kernal of being, that must be stoicially protected and jealously preserved from any effect by life, whatsoever, that my "I" must be kept, without blench or blanch, just as I had received it from the hand of whatever God had dreamed me, so that "I" would end, unaltered by life, just as "I" had begun, but now, at the midst of my old age, the epiphany strikes me that life is in fact a sculptor, whose art I am intended to reflect, not an assailant from whose blows I must hide or pretend imperviousness, and now I grieve for my loss at not learning this earlier, but revel in the joy of learning it at all.