Davis closed with a lesson from a Kamsa Indian named Pedro, who told him that in the first years of life you live beneath the shadow of the past, too young to know what to do, and in the last years you find you are too old to understand the world coming at you from behind. In between there is a small and narrow beam of light that illuminates your life. If you can look back and see that you owned your choices, Davis said, there is little ground for resentment — but bitterness comes to those who look back on choices imposed upon them.