“WE ALL MAKE our deals with life.  We do it invisibly, sometimes unconsciously, and alone, without benefit of collective bargaining.  We come to terms. And the terms are in every case different.  Some of us hold out for more, for better, when others would settle.  Some of us settle when others would hold out.  We leave home, or we marry early, or we enlist, or enroll, or audition, or hunker down into a job then we jump through the hoops, or fly off the tracks, or sell out if there happen to be buyers;  we invest years, gamble dollars, marry late, light out for the territories, raise a fine family, raise hell, declare Chapter Eleven, buy a Harley-Davidson on whim and roar of down the highway clad in leather, save, scrimp, drive a fifteen-year-old phenadip.com Nova with rust, sacrifice joyously, piss it away, loiter, maunder, hold the course, see our child graduate, keep faith with our commitments, sow oats in a high wind, marry often, travel great distances in search of a place to call home, lose big, win big, harbor regrets, fulfill finally our one wildest dream; or, alternatively, we don’t.  The compoundment of it all–what we’ve done and endured, what we’ve left undone and refused to endure–is our individualized deal, also called sometimes by the more august and despairing word fate.  There is no fate.  There’s a lifelong balancing-off between the possible and the all-too-likely, resulting in a succession of half-chosen arrangements, of which the last is burial or cremation.” – David Quammen (in the fabulous book Wild Thoughts from Wild Places)