Someone once told me that the essence of childhood and adolescence is a sense of endless possibility. Life seems like a smorgasbord of infinite choices without constraint. ("When I grow up I want to be a firefighter-ballerina-brain-surgeon…") As we mature, we gain a sense of limits: the limitations of time, energy, and even (or perhaps especially) the limits of our own physicality and mortality. We learn (perhaps with a mixture of sadness and relief) that our choices are sometimes mutually exclusive, that in many instances making one choice precludes another. We choose a life partner to the exclusion of others. We choose to live in a particular city, and we accept its strengths and limitations. We learn, as a revered seminary teacher of mine, Rabbi Jerome Malino of blessed memory, used to like to say, that "every situation includes the advantages of its deficiencies and the deficiencies of its advantages."