Questions you can answer in 100 words or less

Here is today's question, and I will provide my own answer to the question right after asking it. Please feel free to add your answer (and you can do so more than once, if you like) as a comment to this post.

How would you be different if your single-greatest fear suddenly was gone from your life and had never been there in the first place? In other words, would your life have progressed down a different fork in the road?

I would probably be a person in the performing arts, although it is hard to know just where in that realm. Perhaps a conductor of an orchestra, or a vocal performer, or a comedian...I don't know how my journey would have steered me. There are times when I speculate, though. It is usually the quiet, alone times when the thought bubbles up.

Questions you can answer in one sentence

What is it that you find can take your breath away?

You get 100 words, and you can answer more than once if you like.

I'll start: it takes my breath away every afternoon during the work week when I return from work and see my wife for the first time that day. Don't tell her I said that! She might get the big head.

It takes my breath away to consider, as I do often, how amazingly lucky I am to have the life I have, given where I was when I was twenty. Anyone facing an insurmountable challenge needs to be willing to hold fast to the mast and wait for the storm to blow over. It always does. No, not sometimes! It always blows over.