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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;robinjojo, post: 4565321, member: 110226&quot;]Thank you all, for the kind comments of support.&nbsp; i really didn&#039;t intend to make this thread just about myself, bur rather as a comment of how we all have interests that help us deal with stress.</p><p><br /></p><p>Oliver Sacks, who passed away in 2015, was an avid collector.&nbsp; Here is what he had to say in an editorial that year, after being diagnosed with metastatic cancer.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>&quot;I have tended since early boyhood to deal with loss — losing people dear to me — by turning to the nonhuman. When I was sent away to a boarding school as a child of 6, at the outset of the Second World War, numbers became my friends; when I returned to London at 10, the elements and the periodic table became my companions. Times of stress throughout my life have led me to turn, or return, to the physical sciences, a world where there is no life, but also no death.</i></p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><i>And now, at this juncture, when death is no longer an abstract concept, but a presence — an all-too-close, not-to-be-denied presence — I am again surrounding myself, as I did when I was a boy, with metals and minerals, little emblems of eternity. At one end of my writing table, I have element 81 in a charming box, sent to me by element-friends in England: It says, “Happy Thallium Birthday,”a souvenir of my 81st birthday last July; then, a realm devoted to lead, element 82, for my just celebrated 82nd birthday earlier this month. Here, too, is a little lead casket, containing element 90, thorium, crystalline thorium, as beautiful as diamonds, and, of course, radioactive — hence the lead casket.&quot;</i></p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><i></i>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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