rience itself: life`s gifts are precious -- but we are too heedless of them.

　　Here then is the first pole of life` s paradoxical demands on us : Never too busy for the wonder and the awe of life. Be reverent before each dawning day. Embrace each hour. Seize each golden minute.

　　Hold fast to life...but not so fast that you cannot let go. This is the second side of life` s coin, the opposite pole of its paradox: we must accept our losses, and learn how to let go.

　　This is not an easy lesson to learn, especially when we are young and think that the world is ours to command, that whatever we desire with the full force of our passionate being can, nay, will, be ours. But then life moves along to confront us with realities, and slowly but surely this truth dawns upon us.

　　At every stage of life we sustain losses -- and grow in the process. We begin our independent lives only when we emerge from the womb and lose its protective shelter. We enter a progression of schools, then we leave our mothers and fathers and our childhood homes. We get married and have children and then have to let them go. We confront the death of our parents and our spouses. We face the gradual or not so gradual waning of our strength. And ultimately, as the parable of the open and closed hand suggests, we must confront the inevitability of our own demise, losing ourselves as it were, all that we were or dreamed to be.

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