Measure success by how well you have used what you were given and how much you have given back.

From Alfred’s journal

The Kowalski boy came home from the city in a car long enough to need two parking spaces, and stood in the driveway waiting for somebody to come out and see it. Nobody did for a while. I spent most of my younger years counting what other birds had, the fat feeders, the heated birdbath on Pine Street, and I called that arithmetic ambition. Measure success by how well you have used what you were given and how much you have given back; I wrote it down and then sat with it, because I am not sure I know how to audit the second half. Switch buried forty acorns in October and will find maybe nine of them, and the rest come up as oaks, which is giving back by accident. Still counts, I think, though I would like to have meant it.