But whatever comes, I know the one thing I did not know six months ago, the thing a doctor and a carpenter and a four-pound baby taught me in the space of eighteen days.

The measure of a man is not the grandeur of what he builds.

It is whether he stays standing when the house begins to shake.

I intend to be standing.

I am learning, a little more every ordinary day, exactly how to stay.

I come back, at the very end, to the phone.

To the third ring, and the impulse I have never been able to explain, and the fact that I answered a call I would ordinarily have let go to voicemail, in the middle of the most important meeting of my career.

I have turned that moment over a thousand times, because everything I now have hung on it, and because it frightens me how nearly it went the other way.