I believe that a person’s first yes–the initial commitment to stop drinking, to pursue help for depression, to start therapy, to begin taking Metamucil–is always the hardest, and that each subsequent yes after that gets easier. But a person is never done. All your life you have to continue nodding, or gesturing in some way that indicates an affirmative … that you’re throwing yourself into the process for a second, third, or 697th round. 

Because you’re never really cured.

But it’s okay, because if you’re like me, something will have clicked during your first yes, and your life will take on a meaning of its own, one that the psychic you hired at the beach failed to mention, one not included in your projections for the year 2087–a meaning that Swedish diplomat and Christian mystic, Dag Hammarskjold writes about when he says:

I don’t know Who – or what – put the question. I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone – or Something – and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.

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