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one day, despite everything, a really clear and present peace will descend on you. you will find yourself almost retroactively feeling that peace as it happens: you'll realize it's been a few minutes or hours or days since you Thought About It. you'll notice that you're actually fully relaxed and you've been relaxed for a little while. that while today might just be a normal day, it felt like a normal day - it was a little tiring, but not overly so; there were moments of fun in there, and you got to see a little bit of beauty. you will realize that in between the self-help books you've "read" (glanced over) and the podcasts and the journaling, this moment is the tip of a long and beautiful ship you've been swimming towards for years now. you will realize: you've been teaching (coaching, parenting, punishing-sometimes, but ultimately yes - loving) yourself to see the beauty in the world, and now you do it almost automatically, by rote. you will realize that happiness is not just the wild abandon of summer; the concerts and the parties and the beaches. happiness is like love: it is gentle and soft, unassuming. it is confident and ready, a stable and earnest peace that is not the brittle holding-fast of your childhood but instead a real and impenetrable wall; a thing that once-felt cannot be dismissed. a thing that will always be there, in a sense, or at least will be something you could always make again - and you know this because you built it.