Why is happiness so hard to find? When we find happiness, why is it so hard to keep? When we so assiduously search for happiness, why do we find ourselves mired in anxiety and depression instead?

Life and Happiness

It is not too difficult to figure out that we get happiness by engaging with self and life. We become happy when we engage in or appreciate the beauty that is all around us, a glorious sunset, a poignant song, a majestic building, a kind neighbor, a playful puppy, a beautiful butterfly. We also get happiness through the process of creation and expression, writing a story, dancing to music, making art, interacting with loved ones, helping others. Happiness comes with embracing life through more passive enjoyment (appreciating) or more active participation (doing).

Each of us is different so the experiences that bring life happiness will also be different. The things we enjoy may change as we grow and mature, but that is also part of the beauty of life. As long as we are engaged, I believe that happiness comes naturally, almost effortlessly.

So why then is happiness so elusive? Why do we expend so much effort trying to find it and keep it, only to come up empty handed?

Happily Ever After

Ironically, the problem with happiness comes as a result of our love for it. When we love, we also fear losing or never attaining that which we love. Our love of happiness causes us to fear not finding or keeping it. If we do not tend to this very natural fear, it will grow and drive us to grasp at and possess happiness permanently. We will want the fairytale ending of living happily ever after, being in love and happy every single moment of our lives for eternity.

This hyper-intention of happiness or fairytale ending is unrealistic and can never be reached. In striving for the unattainable, we fail, become discontented, and miss the realistic moments of true happiness in our lives.

When I was young I went about achieving my fairytale ending by following the well-travelled path of school, college and successful career. I had a plan, I was going to execute it, give it my all, and then some. This is what society teaches us is the path to happiness. If we execute this path well when we are young, we will be all set and live happily ever after. Sadly, this is a load of horse pucky. Of course I was not happy. The world is littered with many rich, successful, talented, and famous people who are deeply unhappy even at the pinnacle of their success.

Happiness is not about money, fame, or anything else in the external world. We all know this at some level, studies show this, and yet we insist on disbelieving it and continue treading that same path over and over again. Note that money and fame are not inherently bad or unhealthy. The key here is the motivation for our striving, whether it comes from a place of fear or a place of love.

A fear driven intention for happiness is extreme, outcome based, uncompromising, intolerant, and not in-step with reality. A love driven intention for happiness is tolerant, process based, and engaged in understanding or deep listening.

Love-based –
When happiness comes, we welcome it and bow to it. When it goes, we say thank you in gratitude and let it go. We learn to welcome and enjoy the next emotion(s) that comes along.

Fear-based –
When happiness comes, we grasp at it and try to possess it for all time. When it goes, we panic and frantically try to hold-on to it. When we fail, we pretend, deny, become discontented, angry, depressed, and even more afraid that we will not be able to find happiness again. We blame others, reject our other emotions, and ultimately reject ourselves for failing to permanently hold onto happiness.

Happiness and Fear

When we cling to happiness because we fear being unhappy, we end up pushing happiness further and further away. Fear based desires continue to feed our fears and cause us to withdraw from life. In this case, our fear of being unhappy causes us to reject most of our other emotions because they are “not happiness”.

Since we are not in direct control of our emotions, rejecting large swathes of our feelings will cause us to be discontented most of the time. As soon as we are not happy we blame ourselves, project our blame onto those around us, blame Fate, blame God, or blame Life. We run around madly trying to recapture the happiness of past experiences or trying to copy the perceived happy experiences of others. If we are not as happy as before, we get discontented. If we are not as happy as others, we get discontented.

It is difficult to be happy when we are constantly driven by the fear of being unhappy.

Our discontentment and failure to achieve perfect happiness causes us more suffering, which feeds our fear of being unhappy, leading to more mad running around trying to find ever elusive happiness. When we do things to take our mind away from our unhappiness, there is little enjoyment in doing them because there is no love involved, only fear. Fear breeds more fear and so on until we fall into the chronic blahs, including boredom, discontentment, anxiety, and depression.

We start asking, is this all there is to life? The answer is no, because life need not be controlled by our fears.

How to Be Happy

I have found that there are three main ingredients to happiness –

1. Awareness

The first step to happiness is through awareness and mindfulness. To be happy, we first need to be aware of all our emotions, which is to say we want them to rise up to consciousness so that we may identify them and process them in a mindful and healthy manner.

Our conditioning or habit is to avoid our fears and other uncomfortable emotions through the use of automatic defense mechanisms (e.g. repression, denial, displacement). However, doing so leads to fear, envy, anger, or some other strong emotion controlling our decisions and behaviors.

With mindfulness training, we reinsert our consciousness back into the decision making process so that we may respond to difficult feelings from a calm center. In this way, we prevent ourselves from getting caught by our thoughts and emotions. With mental discipline we can self-soothe or regulate our responses and behaviors, as well as weaken the grip of fear and other problematic thoughts and feelings.

2. Engagement

As we have discussed previously, the secret to happiness is engagement with life. However, our fears cause us to withdraw from life. Therefore, every time fear tells us to withdraw, we carefully reflect on the situation using our new found mindfulness and awareness skills. If there is no real danger involved, then we override and choose to engage instead. By doing what fear tells us not to, we face our fears and slowly weaken the hold that fear has over us. This process is also known as exposure or paradoxical intention in psychological circles. Note that for exposure to “work” it has to be a deliberate decision from us, not a forced decision or action.

For example, when I first started meditation exercises, I developed a fear for meditation. Sitting silently caused many uncomfortable repressed thoughts and emotions to rise to consciousness (awareness) and this scared the daylights out of me. To face my fear of feeling bad, I deliberately decided to continue with meditation through the feelings of fear. Each time I faced this fear, the pattern weakened slightly, then a bit more, and so on until meditation became easier, more comfortable. Through repetition, I built a greater tolerance for fear and a greater understanding of the source of that fear.

From there, I started facing more and more of my fears and in the process I learned more and more about myself. I faced the fears of my childhood, including the fear of fear (hypersensitivity to the physical symptoms of fear) and the fear of abandonment, which resulted in hyper-approval seeking behavior. I faced my internal fears including fear of emotions, fear of self-worth, fear of failure, fear of shifting self-identity. I faced my existential fears including the fear of not having control, fear of duality, fear of illness, aging, and death.

Note that fear is a natural human emotion and it is an intrinsic part of us. As such, it cannot be eradicated or fully trained away. When we mindfully tend to our fears and repeatedly face them, fear will still arise but it will have a lessening effect on us.

Only to the extent that a person exposes themselves over and over again to annihilation and loss can that which is indestructible be found within them. In this daring lie dignity and the spirit of true awakening.
~~[Jack Kornfield]

3. Wisdom

Our life is made up of a series of dualities – gain and loss, success and failure, victory and defeat, happiness and sorrow, pleasure and pain, incredible beauty and deep suffering. It is not possible to have one without the other. Both sides of the duality contribute to the infinite richness of life.

Whether in success or failure, every experience is a learning experience, or an opportunity to gain wisdom. Every experience is a step forward in our journey and the seed for taking the next step. A success today may lead to a failure tomorrow. Similarly, learning from a failure today may lead to successes down the road. If we are mindful and stay engaged with life, we cannot truly fail. It is only when we stop learning or stop trying (withdraw from life) that we get into trouble. However, we can always get back onto the path by simply taking a step in the right direction.

The path to happiness is not a direct or easy one, but it is one that leads to freedom, love, and joy of life.

However, if we love life, then we naturally fear death. But if we fear death, then we will be filled with worries of illness and aging, making it difficult to love life.

There are many such conflicts that arise in life, in which love and fear create opposing desires (dualities), between which we must navigate and make judgements. When these conflicts start to dominate our lives, we develop anxiety and depression. When we are unable to adequately resolve these conflicts, our brains may get stuck, which can result in emotion loops where our anxiety and depression become chronic. Sometimes, this condition can turn into an existential crisis.

This was what happened to me after facing the death of a loved one.

Love and Fear – Overcoming Our Wiring for Suffering

Love and Fear

Love and fear are two of the strongest human emotions and they seem to work in opposition. Fear motivates us to run away while love motivates us to stay and embrace. It is difficult to love what we fear, and yet fear arises out of love.

From love comes attachment or desire. Attachment is “a feeling that binds one to a person, thing, cause, ideal, or the like (Dictionary.com).” If we already have the object of our attachment, then we will strive to grow or keep it. If we do not, we strive to acquire it. Whenever an attachment is formed, fear arises (i.e. we fear losing the object of our love).

From fear comes aversion or rejection. Fear tells us we can’t or shouldn’t do, are not strong enough to feel, or not calm enough to think. Fear tries to protect us by reminding us of our limits, real or imagined.

We are wired to see fear as something bad, unpleasant, uncomfortable, literally scary. Fear can cause us to go into a “fight-or-flight” response, which causes physiological changes that place stress on our bodies. Continued activation of our fight/flight response can result in inflammation, muscle tension and pain, insomnia, as well as various chronic physiological conditions. Fear is our enemy, the monster in the dark. Fear increases our suffering. As a result, many of us develop a strong attachment to eradicate or remove fear from our lives.

The only thing we have to fear … is fear itself.
~~[Franklin D. Roosevelt]

However, like love, fear is part of being human. We are born to fear pain, both physical and emotional. Fear and pain are an integral part of our survival system, thus they are an integral part of life. Suffering is therefore also part of life and part of being human. When we try to eradicate fear and suffering, we will inevitably fail, and create even more fear and suffering for ourselves. The best way to lessen our suffering is to embrace both love and fear.

The best way to lessen our suffering is to embrace fear and suffering.

Attachment and Aversion

Attachments are a necessary part of life. We form attachments to people, things, places, activities, beliefs, causes, and more. If we had no attachments, why would life be worth living? If nothing matters, why try to live at all?

However, even though life demands attachments, the nature of life is also one of change and impermanence. The things and people we cling or attach to today may be gone tomorrow. This creates great pain and suffering. To protect us from this pain, we develop fear and fear causes aversion.

For example, I was very attached to success in school and at work because it was my ticket to physical and financial freedom. This attachment caused me to develop a fear of failure. Unfortunately, I did not know how to tend to my fear so I just suppressed or ignored it. As time went on, my fear of failure grew until I developed a strong attachment to never failing (i.e. a strong attachment to perfect success).

This is an unhealthy attachment because unlike my original desire (freedom), it is motivated by fear. It also subsumed my original desire so now when I strived for success, I was feeding this need for perfection, which in turn further fueled my fear of failure. So round and round it went and my fear kept growing. It grew in intensity and it expanded into other areas of my life. Now my meals had to be perfect, my art had to be perfect, my spouse had to be perfect, I had to be perfect in all things. The things at which I could not be perfect, I rejected or avoided. Life quickly became stressful and very unhappy.

This anxiety loop also caused endless striving – as soon as success was achieved I worried about the next hoop I had to jump through, or the next person I had to surpass. When there was no clear next hoop, I worried about not losing my current status or position.

Anxiety loops trap us into always striving for the next goal, and cause us to miss what is right in front of us. We miss being present for life’s journey. We miss the enjoyment of learning and working towards success because we are too worried about running away from failure.

Once you realize that the road is the goal and that you are always on the road – not to reach a goal, but to enjoy its beauty and its wisdom – life ceases to be a task and becomes natural and simple, in itself an ecstasy.
~~[Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj]

All this perfectionism and striving ended up trapping me in an ever narrowing prison, which is exactly the opposite of my original desire, which was to gain more freedom. Note that attachment and striving are not “bad” in and of themselves, they only become unhealthy when they are motivated by strong fear or aversion.

Attachments are a necessary part of life.

Wisdom and Awareness

To avoid forming unhealthy attachments (fear motivated goals) we need awareness and wisdom. Awareness and wisdom tell us what the problem is, where it is coming from, and how we can effectively tend to it.

Wisdom, according to the Oxford dictionary, is “the soundness of an action or decision with regard to the application of experience, knowledge, and good judgment.” To know what knowledge and experience are relevant, as well as how to apply them, we need awareness. However, awareness can also uncover inconvenient truths about ourselves, our family and friends, our life, or our world that we find difficult to digest.

When we form an attachment to awareness, we develop a fear of learning difficult truths. This is why many of us use ignorance and delusion as coping mechanisms to reject awareness. The truth may be too painful or difficult to accept. On the other hand, I have seen firsthand what delusion and keeping up appearances have done to my parents and family. Secrets and lies are a burden to self and to those around us. False images of self and others lead to poor decisions as well as unnecessary anxieties and suffering. Love cannot thrive in an environment that is filled with secrets and lies.

This is not to say that awareness is always better than ignorance. In fact, ignorance and delusion are a natural and necessary part of life. There are many things in life that we do not have the time to learn. In addition, if we spent all of our time trying to be aware of all things, we would have no time left over for the pleasures of life.

There are also many mysteries in life that we do not know and can never explain. Questions about the soul, the meaning of life, the Creator of life and the universe, the uncaused cause. This is necessary ignorance. In fact, all of life could just be a dream or a delusion, as in Total Recall. We cannot know for sure.

I have a curious mind so I am always asking questions. This is particularly true when I am passionate about a topic. I will keep asking and digging because I want to learn and understand. The more I learn though, the more anxieties I have. Knowledge can be scary and painful. But the reward for that pain is an open mind that is able to entertain any point of view, story, or experience.

The reward for the pain of awareness is an open mind that is able to entertain any point of view, story, or experience.

Fear and Acceptance

Fear tells us to protect ourselves by setting up walls and boundaries. We identify possible threats and separate ourselves from them so that we will not get hurt physically or emotionally. We may reject activities, foods, places, relationships, uncomfortable thoughts, and painful memories. If we let fear control us, we eventually become scared, paralyzed, and alone.

As fear grows, it becomes aversion and we develop fear-motivated attachments. Such unhealthy attachments can become anxiety/depression loops and spiral downward quickly. Without careful tending, fear attachments multiply, crowding out healthy love-motivated attachments until only anxiety and depression remain. It is important to remember however, that fear comes from love, so the best way to deal with fear is to return her to love. The solution to this love-fear conflict is acceptance.

There are two kinds of suffering. There is the suffering you run away from, which follows you everywhere. And there is the suffering you face directly, and so become free.
~~[Ajahn Chah]

When we face our fears and learn to accept them, we can let love into our lives again. To face our fears we need to –

1. Be aware when we feel fear.
2. Be calm enough to name fear and embrace her. Naming fear can engage the left or logical side of our brain, which helps to regulate our emotions. Mindful breathing, becoming the Observer, visualization, journaling, talking, and tapping are further tools for self-soothing.
3. Once our minds are calm, we can analyze fear and identify the thoughts, memories, or attachments that power the emotion. What do we fear? Why do we fear it? Are our fears accurate? Cognitive behavioral therapy can be useful here.
4. Based on our analysis, we determine if we want to follow fear’s advice. This is where wisdom comes into play. If we decide that there is nothing to fear, then we lean into fear and do the opposite. We keep doing it or decide on doing it until the fear dissipates. This helps to create tolerance for that particular fear, which helps to weaken it.
5. We may also adjust or correct inaccurate thoughts or attachments that power our fears, which will further weaken the pattern.

By facing and weakening various fear patterns, we also weaken the attachments associated with those fears. Ultimately, those unhealthy attachments will no longer have any strength and we would have let them go. We also have attachments that come from love, which fulfill our heart’s desires. These we want to keep and protect from the misdirection of unfounded fears or aversion.

Only to the extent that a person exposes themselves over and over again to annihilation and loss can that which is indestructible be found within them. In this daring lie dignity and the spirit of true awakening.
~~[Jack Kornfield]

By facing and weakening various fear patterns, we also weaken the attachments associated with those fears.

Conflict and Suffering

Our brains reward certainty, permanence, and awareness, because they help in our survival. The more we know and the more stability we have in our daily lives, communities, and environment, the better our chances for survival. However, Nature is ever-changing, impermanent, and contains many mysteries. Nature also places limits on time, space, matter, and energy.

Whenever we run up against these limits, conflict arises, fear arises, and we feel pain and suffering. Since Nature’s laws are not in our control, these conflicts are difficult to resolve and can sometimes turn into anxiety loops that keep growing our fears. Because Nature imposes limits on us, pain, fear, and suffering are part of human life. They are not an affliction or illness but rather a shared universal human experience.

However, this does not mean that we are totally helpless. While some suffering is necessary, we create a lot of unnecessary suffering because our brains try to optimize for short-term pain avoidance. We end-up feeding many of our fear motivated attachments and growing our fears until we are buried by them. This is why awareness is critical. If we are aware of our fears and their related attachments, then we may tend to them and weaken their influence.

In most cases, it is difficult to tell whether our actions or strivings are motivated by love or fear. Often, it is motivated by both. Fear based attachments tend to be outcome based, so we derive very little pleasure from them. Once an outcome is reached, we quickly get driven forward by fear again. Fear causes us to prove ourselves over and over again. Love based attachments are process based, outcomes are less relevant, and there is more lasting happiness.

Rather than trying to separate out the different classes of attachments, I find it more effective to simply face my fears whenever they arise. By facing my fears I build up a tolerance for fear, and I can gradually weaken and release fear-based attachments. This gives me more freedom to form new love-based attachments and to just enjoy the process of achievement. By facing my deepest fears related to thoughts, emotions, and memories, I free myself to entertain any thought, experience any emotion, and recall any memory. In this way, I gain limitless freedom of consciousness.

Because Nature imposes limits on us, pain, fear, and suffering are part of a shared universal human experience.

Meaning of Life

We are born to want. We are born to want to give pleasure and to receive pleasure. This results in love. We are born to want to avoid pain. This results in fear.

Frequently, our wants may compete or even conflict with one another. When we develop too many fear attachments or prioritize fear attachments over love attachments, then we start to sacrifice pleasure for short-term pain avoidance. This can lead to fear crowding out love and we end-up with little pleasure and a lot of unnecessary pain.

To avoid this very unhappy state of affairs, we want to embrace our fears. When we do this, we will soon realize that beneath all that fear is a lot of emotional pain that we are too afraid to touch. The most core fear of all is the fear of pain. This is the ultimate pattern that we must dispel.

Running from pain will only strengthen our fears and lead to more suffering. Therefore, we must face our pain. This requires us to stay with the pain and experience it. We do this by using the same emotion regulation techniques as we did for fear. The more we dwell with our pain, the more skilled we become at regulating it and the more tolerance we build. When we develop enough mental discipline to dwell comfortably in pain, we truly free ourselves from suffering.

The dance of life is learning to hold both love, fear, and all the dualities they generate in loving-kindness (without judgement) and to move comfortably between them depending on circumstance. This is also known as the Middle Way in Taoism. If we only see things as black and white or good and bad, we will miss what is possible and invite into our hearts unnecessary anxiety, depression, and suffering. When we can maintain peace in the midst of conflict, when we can be comfortable in discomfort, when we can smile at our own suffering, then our consciousness is free to fly wherever it desires, and we have found Heaven on Earth.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. If there is a purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and in dying. But no man can tell another what this purpose is. Each must find out for himself, and must accept the responsibility that his answer prescribes.
~~[Gordon W. Allport]

The dance of life is learning to hold both love, fear, and all the dualities they generate in loving-kindness.

Love, the Ultimate Good Emotion

Love is often spoken about in reverent terms. It is this pure and perfect part of us, the part that rises above, the part that perseveres, the part that conquers all. Many believe that our consciousness or soul is born of love and will return to love when we die.

Jesus is love. Buddha is love.

I love Shania and JJ deeply, crazily, with wild abandon, and all the way. That is my nature. Shania was a three legged dog. She was one of those super happy, affectionate, dogs who was very easy to love. When she was happy, I was happy. Since she was happy pretty much all the time, so was I. She also made many of the people around her happy. Most of our neighbors loved her and became friends with me because of Shania. Love has a wonderful multiplicative effect of spreading happiness.

This is one side of love.

I love Shania and JJ deeply, crazily, with wild abandon, and all the way.

Love and Loss

There are as many forms of love as there are moments in time.
~~[Jane Austen]

Love, however, is more complex than happily ever after. As soon as there is love, a relationship, or an attachment, loss enters the picture.

• We fear the loss of our loved-one to someone else, this breeds jealousy.
• We fear the loss of other opportunities for love. What are we missing out on?
• We fear the loss of independence. How do I live with you?
• We fear abandonment and loneliness. How do I live without you?
• We fear the loss of our loved-one to illness, aging, and death.

My parents divorced when I was about 9 years old. Looking back, I now see that my mother suffered greatly from that loss. She did not know how to respond to her pain, and as a result, she said and did many cruel things. We children were caught in the middle and we suffered greatly from it.

Love is not simple. We can choose to label love-gone-wrong as over-attachment, grasping, or addiction, but whichever label we use does not change the nature or complexity of the emotion. Love can cause people to act in extreme ways and it can cause great suffering.

Love is not simple.

In the very beginning I tried to deny loss. I told myself that I was fine emotionally, and focused on the physical symptoms of loss purely from a body illness standpoint. Later, I thought of loss as the price I had to pay for love. I love both Shania and JJ, so the deep pain I feel after their death is the price I have to pay for all the love and happiness they brought into my life. Love came with strings attached, but I still saw love and loss as opposites: love is good and loss is bad. While closer to the truth, this is not an accurate picture of love and loss.

I now realize that loss is simply a continuation of love. I still love Shania and JJ deeply and all the way. They are gone, but my love for them has not changed. As a result, I miss them greatly. This, in turn, causes me to feel deep pain, sorrow, grief, and suffering.

I now realize that loss is simply a continuation of love.

Rejecting loss or the pain of loss means rejecting love and the pain of love. They are one and the same. If I did not love them, I would not feel the deep pain that I feel. Loss is the name that we give love after our loved-one has died or left us. Pain and loss are not a taint on my memories, but part of the love that accompanies them. I am not ill nor do I have anything to blame myself for, except for continuing to love.

When we lose a loved-one, we still yearn for them.
The love continues, and we feel pain.
The stronger the love, the stronger the pain.
This is what we call grief and suffering.

Recovering from Anxiety and Grief

How then does one recover from loss? Should I cast my love away now that it is no longer convenient? To avoid the pain, I tried very hard not to think of Shania and JJ, but that only worked for the very short term. In the end, I struggled, failed, and suffered even more.

I have a lifetime of unprocessed emotions, so I was carrying a lot of emotional baggage. This contributed to my anxiety and depression. However, a big part of why I was so stuck was because of the way I viewed my emotions – in terms of duality, opposites, good and bad.

• Love is good, loss is bad.
• Happiness is good, sadness is bad.
• Courage is good, fear is bad.

This flawed view of life created considerable internal conflict because I wanted to eradicate one side of the emotion equation, which is impossible. I cannot install courage without facing fear and I cannot embrace love without embracing the pain of loss.

To resolve this conflict, we need to move beyond this limited view of emotions as good or bad. Courage is not purely good and fear bad, they are both part of a whole. One does not exist without the other. Similarly, love is not purely good and loss bad, they are also part of a whole. The key to recovery is to stop rejecting and to embrace them all with loving-kindness.

A big part of why I was so stuck was because of the way I viewed my emotions – in terms of duality, opposites, good and bad.

Does this mean we must feel pain and suffering? Yes, we will need to face our pain and our suffering. This is necessary, just as we need to face our fear. Mindful breathing, emotion recognition and regulation (RAIN, RULER), cognitive behavioral therapy, energy therapy (tapping), somatic therapy, and more, are all tools that can help us tend to our emotions.

Facing our difficult emotions will help us build tolerance. Tolerance will expand our lives and ultimately set us free to access any memory, analyze any thought, feel any emotion, and no longer be controlled by our pain, fears, and worries. In this way we transform our pain into limitless freedom.

I bask in the glory of their love,
And cry in the shadow of their loss.
Love and loss, I hold both in loving-kindness,
And in so doing, I find peace at last.

Love and Letting Go

What does it mean to let it go? In the past, the “experts” advised people to try and let go fully after the death of a loved-one. Nowadays, the new recommendation is to let go of the physical relationship, but continue with the emotional and spiritual bond. I am not sure anyone can let go of those, even if they wanted to.

So what does acceptance mean? Acceptance means accepting my new life without Shania and JJ in it. In the past, when I woke up, I thought of the day I would have with them and I was happy. Now when I wake up, I think that they are no longer here, and I am sad. But that is ok. I lean into the fear, sorrow, and pain and think about Shania and JJ with love. The joy is still there. When we see that the pain comes from love, then the anger and self-blame drops away, some of the fear drops away, and the pain seems worthy to bear.

There will never be another Shania or JJ. They are the loves of my life and part of them will be with me for as long as I shall live. There will be other loves and it will never be the same, but to paraphrase a wise soul, “life is broken, but still good”. By denying the pain, I deny my love, and in so doing I deny myself.

Although, in the present, there are some things that you dislike, there are many more conditions that make happiness possible. It is true that when you walk through a garden, you can see that a tree is dying. But the sadness of that situation should not prevent you from enjoying the rest of the garden that is still alive. Don’t let the dead tree image stop you from enjoying all the trees growing strong and beautiful. Look again and you will see how many things there are in the garden of your life that you can still enjoy.
~~[Thich Nhat Hanh]

There will never be another Shania or JJ. They are the loves of my life.