The truth is, we are all so very, very vulnerable. Life is as it is. We don't even have contorol over the health of our children. The only thing we can control is our attitude. We spend our days bedgered by voices that tell us to judge others, fea others, harm others, or harm ourselves. But we are not obligated to listen to those voices, or even to take responsibilty for them. We have the choice of life or death, love or fear, in each moment. And we bear the responsibility for that choice in each moment. We set out to better ourselves, only to find legions of reasons to break our committment to health. We say it is too difficult to make the hard choice today. And yet the obstacles in our path *are* the path. Every time we stretch beyonw our resistance and our fear, we gake a choice for life. And every time we choose life, we find that fear loses its grip on us. - Rolf Gates, *Meditations from the Mat, p.26 & 28.