It’s a revelation, though: when you begin to internalize all this even just a bit, the result is not despair, but an energizing surge of motivation. You come to see that the terrible eventuality against which you’d spent your life subliminally tensing your muscles, because it would be too appalling to experience, has already happened—and yet here you are, still alive, at least for the time being. “Abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning,” Chödrön says. You realize that you never really needed the feeling of complete security you’d previously felt so desperate to
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