The happiness that someone like Mark misses is unreal and unhealthy. He needs to learn to want a different type of relative happiness – that is, a state of reasonable contentment, with intermittent joy and pain, which, unlike the myth of a permanent bliss, can potentially be achieved. Switching from one goal to the other will involve a process of a... See more

Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave th... See more

This constant change or fluctuation, ex pressed by the Buddhist concept of “impermanence,” gives rise to the fundamental sufferings of human existence. But occasionally amid the flux of life, perhaps for a fleeting instant, we sense an underlying rhythm, a hum or a pulse, to all things. Such moments of insight and realization often occur after an e

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