Suffering isn’t necessary to spend my time here. I can live a relaxed, joyous, and carefree life.

A belief gets absorbed early and rarely inspected: that ease has to be earned, and that anything obtained without difficulty does not quite count.

You can watch it operate on any free Saturday afternoon. Twenty minutes of genuine rest and something starts scanning for a task, uneasy, as though relaxation were a debt accruing interest.

Difficulty comes anyway. It does not need to be manufactured or topped up, and adding some voluntarily buys no protection from the involuntary kind.

Which leaves the afternoon. It is allowed to just be an afternoon.