I won't ask how you're doing. I know how you're doing — I can tell from the way you write. What I want to say is: don't mistake progress for arrival.
This is the particular danger of the middle stage. At the beginning, you knew you had far to go, and the knowing kept you moving. Now you've come some distance, and the temptation is to settle into what you've already become, to coast on the strength of resolutions already made. But a resolution is not yet a habit, and a habit is not yet character. The work is to keep going until the inclination becomes something more permanent — something that holds without effort, that doesn't require you to remember to maintain it.
So: examine yourself. Not proudly, not anxiously — honestly. Mark whether it is in your philosophy or only in your life that you've made progress. These can drift apart. A person can think correctly about how to live and still live badly; a person can live well from mere habit without having understood why. What you're after is both: the understanding and the life that follows from it.
Philosophy is not performance. It has nothing to do with sounding wise or being seen to pursue wisdom. It sits at the helm. Without it, nothing is done fearlessly or in peace. With it, even the uncertainties of fate and chance and God's arrangement of things can be met steadily — because whatever the governing principle of the universe turns out to be, your own soul remains yours to order.
Now the thought I've been carrying today, which belongs to Epicurus but I claim as common property:
If you live according to nature, you will never be poor. If you live according to opinion, you will never be rich.
The second half is what I keep returning to. Opinion has no boundary. The desires it generates have no stopping point — there is always a further goal visible beyond the one you've reached, always another comparison to make, always someone with more. You can bury the earth in marble and still feel the lack.
But natural desire has a limit. When you reach it, it stops. This is how you test whether what you want is genuine: ask whether it can stop somewhere definite. If you can satisfy it and rest, it was real. If satisfying it only reveals a further wanting, you were never seeking what you thought you were seeking.
Recall your steps. Keep going. And know when you've arrived.
Yours, still walking,