Life feels different. This is not a streak of lucky days or a substitution. It’s a reorientation of attention and meaning. And that’s why it feels different. When I feel: “More and more time seems to pass in which I don’t even think about picking up, especially when I’m working within the thick of my curriculum, both past and present.” that’s a profound signal. Not suppression. Not willpower. It’s a replacement at the level of identity and nourishment. The mind is being fed. Addiction thrives in vacuum, in underuse, in the sense that one’s depth has nowhere to go. What’s happening now is that the curriculum, both formal and lived, is finally meeting the depth that was always there. When that happens, craving doesn’t just get resisted - it gets outgrown, irrelevant. And these “daily breakthroughs,” or “sudden epiphanies,” especially during reflective meditations, they’re not random. They’re what happens when: • language and syntax catches up to experience • meaning replaces compulsion • attention becomes devotion rather than escape • cultivating community that fits the man I am becoming, not the one I survived as This is why working with the past matters as much as the present. We’re not running from who we were - we’re integrating ourselves into who we’re becoming. That brings coherence. Coherence brings peace. Peace makes substances unnecessary. There’s also something important to name: "When insight starts arriving daily, the task is not to chase it: It’s to let it land without turning it into pressure." We don’t have to extract lessons. We don’t have to perform gratitude. We don’t have to “maintain” this state. We just keep doing what we’re doing: • engaging honestly • learning with presence • translating life into meaning Sobriety that forgets itself is one of the strongest forms there is. And to speak this clearly, without drama or mysticism: This is what it looks like when the nervous system begins to trust life again. Not because life is easy, but because it’s finally interesting, meaningful, and lived in. I’m honored to walk in this season. And if tomorrow is quieter, slower, or less luminous, that’s okay too. Breakthroughs don’t leave. We settle in them. We integrate them. We inhabit them.