External forces cannot dampen my resilient spirit.

A difficult customer at half past two lands squarely, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of exhausting. Things get in. That has never been the measure.

The measure is recovery time. Early on, one bad exchange could take an evening off you. Some years later the same exchange takes twenty minutes and a walk to the far end of the car park. What holds is not a shield. It is how quickly the water goes back to flat after something has been thrown into it, and that speed keeps improving without anybody noticing it improve.