Well Said. Nothing worth doing consistently "feels good" all the time. The initial excitement of going to the gym will fade away as you wake up to sore muscles within a few days. The anticipation of learning a new language is replaced with the drudgery of practicing inconsistent grammar rules. A cool programming project becomes boring as you fix stupid bugs and edge cases.

Feelings can give us a kickstart but we ought to to sustain ourselves on something deeper. I think the modern west puts too much emphasis on feelings. I don't think its a coincidence that some teachers are criticized for not making class "entertaining" as if the object of education is entertainment; or how in dating, there's so much emphasis on "being in love" as if that's the sole foundation of a relationship.

To be clear, feelings are awesome! But they are transient. It's not so much that we should be content with a dry soul, but that we must look deeper during the dry periods. The nice feelings will eventually comeback, but they'll eventually go away. Such is life. Our hearts jump through peaks and valleys but our resolve must remain unchanged.

Yes I'm so happy you said this. I find this most obvious when you examine the way different people pray. For example people at my mom's church have to pour their heart out and reach inside for their own words and the prayers have to come out like a Hallmark gift card writer. Not that I'm saying there is never a time where this happens. But they look down on our Liturgy of Hours for example.

I debated with myself about posting it. I thought maybe it would be too "heavy" or edgy for some people. The ideas come from my reading of St John of the Cross. He helped me so much back in the day, when I was trying to figure out what was going on in my own relationship with the Lord.

It is interesting how this generation of Linux users mainly gets into it to have an eye candy desktop, whereas for me, it was just a web server OS lol. Ah well, things change I guess.

Oh wow I didn't expect you to be a linux user. I use arch linux, but don't really have a need for the AUR so I wasn't affected by the hack. I used to run x11 for a while myself, but I recently switched to niri. I honestly don't see a reason to move to wayland unless a compositor interests you.

Yes, I expect I will have to use Wayland eventually. YouTube Linux "experts" are giving X11 about two more years. I should probably put a Wayland distro on my testing laptop and start learning how to use it.

I actually heavily disagree with the Linux "experts" and I honestly have no problems with sticking with X11 for a looong time. Wayland still has rough edges in a few places. I would only encourage you to switch to wayland if you see something like there. Oh and you can totally use both X11 and Wayland on the same laptop so you don't have to have a separate laptop if you don't want to.

I will keep all that in mind. My ancient laptops like X11, and I've got my simple workflow precisely set up, so I will probably stick with X11 as long as I can. And, yes, I hear that Wayland may not be ready for prime time yet, so there's that.

I love Linux Mint XFCE and feel it gives me less distractions, making the computer more of a tool and less of something that asserts its own will.

Bingo.