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THE GREATEST GIFT is the realization that life does not consist either of wallowing in the past or peering anxiously at the future; and it is appalling to contemplate the great number of often painful steps by which one arrives at a truth so old, so obvious and so frequently expressed. It is good for one to appreciate that life is now. Whether it offers little or much, life is now--this day--this hour--and is probably the only experience of the kind one is to have. This realization performs the inestimable service of letting us discover that it is our lives we are at every moment passing through, and not some useless, ugly, interpolated interval between what has been and what is to come. Life does not know such intervals. They can have no separate identity for they are life itself, and to realize this makes what has seemed long and without value, both precious and fleeting.