We will all have high highs and big days and proud moments of smiles on graduation stages, father-daughter dances at weddings and healthy babies screeching in the delivery room, but between those high highs, we may also have some lumps and some bumps too.
And then I had a 15-hour surgery in which my surgeon, Dr. John Healey at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York, took out my left femur and replaced it with titanium.
Now my grandparents are no longer living, so to honor them, I started a scholarship at the Worcester Art Museum for kids who are in difficult situations but whose caretakers can't afford the classes.
What it was, was the 20th anniversary of the siege, the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo, and I don't like the word "anniversary, " because it sounds like a party, and this was not a party.
So we started in 2006 as part of a team with Thinc Design to create the original master plan for the museum, and then we've done all the media design both for the museum and the memorial and then the media production.
And so what we started with was really a new way of thinking about building an institution, through a project called Make History, which we launched in 2009.
There's no doubt that from now on, the Fourth of July will be remembered not as the day of the Declaration of Independence, but as the day of the discovery of the Higgs boson.
The American invention is the crossword puzzle, and this year we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the crossword puzzle, first published in The New York World.
When the books were first published, I invited her to the book launch party, and in front of everyone there, everyone she had fed over the years, I gave her a piece of artwork and some books.
In 2000, David Best and Jack Haye built the first Temple, and after a member of their team was killed tragically in an accident shortly before the event, the building became a makeshift memorial.
But there's a nonprofit behind it, and kids go through a door that says "Employees Only" and they end up in this space where they do homework and write stories and make films and this is a book release party where kids will read.
I photographed him taking his first unaided breath, the celebratory moment after he showed muscle resistance for the very first time, the new adapted technologies that allowed him to gain more and more independence.
But there is also a pole at the South Pole, and we got there on foot, unassisted, unsupported, by the hardest route, 900 miles in record time, dragging more weight than anyone in history.
(Applause) In 1976, I was asked to design a children's memorial museum in a Holocaust museum in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, which you see here the campus.
The site chosen is across from the Lincoln Memorial; you see it there directly on the Mall. It's the last building on the Mall, on access of the Roosevelt Bridge that comes in from Virginia.
Many people in the United States and Latin America have grown up celebrating the anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage, but was he an intrepid explorer who brought two worlds together or a ruthless exploiter who brought colonialism and slavery?
We open up little windows into our relationship for our community to bear witness, and we do this because we want to make maps to the future and not monuments to ourselves.
I want to ask you now, though, to think maybe from your own experience or maybe just imagine it about the difference between the intensity of the experience under the wedding canopy, and maybe the experience of the sixth or seventh anniversary.
Well, religious ritual and rites were essentially designed to serve the function of the anniversary, to be a container in which we would hold on to the remnants of that sacred, revelatory encounter that birthed the religion in the first place.
Josephine wore violet-scented perfume, carried violets on their wedding day, and Napoleon sent her a bouquet of violets every year on their anniversary.
Now, I've seen the Washington Monument in person thousands of times, well aware of the change in the color of marble a third of the way up, but I had never really looked at it out of context or truly as a work of art.
Because America was from the outset a nation of wave after wave of immigrants, so it had to create an identity which it did by telling a story which you learned at school, you read on memorials and you heard repeated in presidential inaugural addresses.
Like I said, I'm from the Bronx, and the Bronx is tough, tough like walking past sidewalk memorials and dodging cop towers on your way to the train type of tough.
And at the same time, we got a request from this guy -- Van Gogh, the famous Van Gogh Foundation -- who wanted to celebrate his 125th anniversary in the Netherlands.
And what about the large number of people across the globe who can't point to a monument from their past, who don't possess a sacred written text, who can't hark back to the past glories of a civilization or empire?
Now, I don't know what you think, but I think this is a pretty stupid decision, because what you've done is just made a permanent memorial to destruction by making it look like the destruction is going to continue forever.
If we were to print out all three billion A's, T's, C's and G's on a standard font, standard format, and then we were to stack all of those papers, it would be about 130 meters high, somewhere between the Statue of Liberty and the Washington Monument.
My first exhibition in the United States was at the Sesquicentennial exhibition in 1926 -- that the Hungarian government sent one of my hand-drawn pieces as part of the exhibit.
(Laughter) (Applause) So, when it came out in Denmark that we were actually going to move our national monument, the National People's Party sort of rebelled against it.
It's 350 people on the committee for Oklahoma City, which is why we thought of this as a sort of ad-hoc, spontaneous solution that expanded on Union Square and the places that were ad-hoc memorials in the city already.
Now, Sylvia's TED Prize wish was to beseech us to do anything we could, everything we could, to set aside not pin pricks, but significant expanses of the ocean for preservation, "hope spots, " she calls them.
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My guess is the perpetrator wanted a little something to memorialize the occasion. 