Writing letters is becoming a profound experience, and part of that involves a change in my very notion of what a profound experience feels like.

It is not always some huge surge of feeling that washes over me like a religious conversion. It is often a small ember of revelation that perpetually glows, providing just a bit of illumination so that I can see an overall picture a tick clearer than I did before.

Yes, there's some rough stuff going on in my life, and there’s rough stuff going on in the world. It can grind down even the most resilient of us.

What I begin to see, though, is that one of the keys to a good life is not the ability to cast out those rough things, because there are always a slew of them around, always. Instead, it's about being able to see the good not as the flip side of the bad, where we only see one of them at a time, but instead as something that coexists right there next to it. It feels less like tasting something bitter and then tasting something sweet, and more like tasting these two things at the same time and accepting that they're always going to be there in different mixtures at different times.

With all the tough stuff going on, what allows me to take a deep breath and live with it is accepting that the pain is always going to be there. And once I realize and accept that, I suddenly become aware of the good stuff, right there alongside the bad stuff.