Happiness in this World

“What do you want for dinner?” I asked my wife.
“I don’t know,” she answered.  “What do you want?”
“How about hamburgers?”
“No, I don’t want hamburgers.”
“What do you want then?”
“I don’t know…pasta.”

My wife and I are similar in a number of ways, but we’re completely opposite in how we feel about trying new things.  I resist and often fear it, while she positively craves it.  For as long as I can remember, I haven’t even liked trying new foods (an aversion my family and friends have [...]

A few weeks ago, a colleague and I were discussing the devastation in Haiti.  He told me he thought he should go down there to help out—but that he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.  His heart went out to the people suffering there, he said, but apparently not enough to get him to [...]

Several years ago, someone I know told me he was contemplating divorcing his wife.  I wasn’t surprised.  He’d been unhappy in the marriage for some time—and, in my opinion, with good reason:  his wife was jealous to the point of being neurotic, often behaving in ways that were shockingly inappropriate, offensive, and stress-inducing.
Or so he’d [...]

Lately, my wife and I have been having trouble with our water heater.  Over the last few months we’ve been finding the blower blowing but no gas running along with it to actually heat our water.  Recently, the gas would turn on for only 10 minutes before shutting off, leaving the blower going, sometimes all [...]

One day, about a year and a half ago, my wife and I were walking along a street near our home when she grabbed my arm and suddenly exclaimed, “I think that woman is in trouble!”
I followed her gaze to a car stopped at a light and saw to my horror a woman being prevented [...]

Several months ago, my wife and I began toilet training our son, Cruise (the Montessori method is to train toddlers to use the toilet as early as possible).  We’d diligently put him on a small potty in his bathroom as often as we could drag ourselves into doing it and repeat over and over to [...]

My wife and I vividly remember the anesthesiologist’s statement: “You may feel a little pressure.” She spoke the word gently, as if to imply that’s how it would feel, and we believed her.  Epidural blocks, she explained, don’t numb the sacral nerve roots that deliver sensation from the pelvic floor so my wife [...]

In the book Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, the main character, Siddhartha, tells Kamala, a beautiful courtesan:  “From the moment I made [the resolution to learn about love from the most beautiful woman] I also knew that I would execute it…when you throw a stone into the water, it finds the quickest way to the bottom [...]

When my wife and I were first learning to ballroom dance (much fun!) I was amazed at how effortlessly our teacher was able to lead her when demonstrating a technique to me.  She always seemed to know where he wanted her to go and how he wanted her to move, despite being as inexperienced as [...]