A friend sent me this E-Mail the other day and I enjoyed reading it The message stated in the E-Mail gave me lots to think about. I agreed with all of it, my realm of thinking is very much like what was stated. We are on the same page. Hope you can take away something as well. ENJOY.

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An excellent little piece about one of life's truisms. I suppose we all, at one time or another, have one of those rare flashes of insight that illuminates one of our life's aspects.

"and I, I took the path less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." Robert Frost

Subject: Some thoughts on life choices

MR. McCUTCHEON'S VISIT

By Dr. Michael A. Halleen

Some months ago I confessed to my daughter my regret that I had failed to

take the opportunity I once had to attend Harvard. I was caught short by

her reply: "But Dad, then you wouldn't have met Mom!" We were both struck

by the implications: if I had gone to any other college, Barb and I would

probably never have met, and our children - and their children - would

never have been born.

Each life hinges on a thousand million small moments - a step taken left or

right, a decision made yes or no, a chance encounter, an impulse followed

or ignored, a near miss. What we are today - even the fact that we are

today - is the end result of those moments.

William McCutcheon was mayor of North Branch, Minnesota in 1884. He had a

wealthy brother living in New York whose wife was unable to bear children.

It happened occasionally at that time that childless couples would approach

large immigrant families and offer to adopt one of their children,

providing financial help and promising a good home for the child. And so

it was that one afternoon McCutcheon stood in the small front room of a

Swedish family that had immigrated the year prior and offered, in behalf of

his brother and sister-in-law, to adopt Tony, the oldest of this family's

seven children.

The boy's mother, a quiet, shy woman who appeared older than her 34 years,

found tears coming to her gray-green eyes. Life was a constant struggle in

this frontier wilderness. They were barely making it. She gazed for a

moment out the window, perhaps looking down the years to her son's future.

Then she placed her small, weathered hands on young Tony's head and,

through the lump in her throat, said, "Mr. McCutcheon, if God strengthens

these hands, somehow we'll get along." McCutcheon nodded, smiled, and

stepped out the door.

Tony became my grandfather.

Each of our histories is the sum of yesterday's choices. Some we made,

some were made for us. We are the products of their multiplying one upon

another, and we can only accept that our histories are what they are. But

many more such moments will occur, even between today and tomorrow.