Huh.

It's funny that today, the day I thought about whether I'll continue singing around my kids and what they'll make of it - will they enjoy it, will it give them fond memories of me? - is the day I should, later on, stumble across this passage:

"Some of my earliest memories are of hearing my parents singing little melodies in the other room. There was always humming or whistling going on if my dad was nearby. I always got a good feeling from my dad's songs, and that feeling returns nowadays when we get together during holidays or other special occasions. For my entire life, my dad has been liable to break into song at any moment."

2

"So far in this book, I've been telling stories from my adolescence to show how music and science led me to the naturalist perspective that I use to make sense of the world. But in this chapter and the next one, I need to break with that chronology to examine two important subjects. The first is the contribution that powerful childhood experiences make to who we become as adults. The second is the way tragedy shapes and distorts our worldviews. No one can escape these influences on their lives. 

Yet people can interpret them differently, depending on the intellectual framework they use to make sense of the world."

"I've always felt

that I was tremendously lucky during my adolescence. Things easily could have turned out differently for me had I gotten in trouble with the law or gotten addicted to drugs or alcohol. Almost every night, instead of studying, my friends and I would head to Hollywood where the action was. Drugs, sex, and trouble could be had on any given night, and the police and punkers fought a running battle over control of the streets. I was lucky to get through that period of my life without doing great harm to myself or others. Many of my teenage peers weren't so lucky."

--G.G.

"Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself."
— Jean-Paul Sartre