Amazing it is indeed how much we learn about ourselves in the foreboding years. We see life as a handbreadth as opposed to the linear lines of youth. Living is by days and hours, and not by ill-considered years. All is a gift of time and love and happiness and the things that we have been privileged to learn and know – which is nothing – a fleeting moment as is the case of Mayflies. Life is here and then passes away as though it were not. How terrible and wonderful the flying years, how full of promise and full of fear. And in all that I have seen and done, I have done nothing at all. How is it that I continue to live? How does the earth bear me? And yet it is strange, that, when I would have figured that beliefs would only have grown stronger, I feel the more rapacious insistence of questions and doubts. And, most disconcerting, is the feeling that any extrication from the engorged jaws of mental and physical decrepitude is hopeless.