I look back at all I have written, all I have seen.
I think it was a good life, I think it has been well spent.
Kindness and joy, mixed and intermingled with sorrow and regret.
I like to think that I have seen both sides of the spectrum, if not to the extremes,
men burned and broken, for listening to their dreams. I have seen joy and heard laughter,
witnessed the happy innocence of a child with both joy and sadness, for the knowing that it will be taken from them. Ah, for life is a cruel experience, and though joy is in it, and laughter, and peace, and innocence too for a while, for a year, for a day, this all is mingled and mixed, interwoven seamlessly with sadness, regret. With the melancholy of a still winters morning, on a cold winters day. For one cannot be without the other. Or how else could life be? Could the joy of a raindrop falling from a grey and cloudy sky to splash against ones face be truly appreciated, if one had not first to experience the long, hard years of bitter drought, and the women's wailing cries in time of famine? Or could the joy of innocence, total and pure, be recognized for what it was, if one had never lost it? This is the balance of life, yin and yang, universal and eternal, for if it was not, how could we exist at all?