"We are visitors on this planet. We are here for ninety or one hundred years at the very most. During that period, we must try to do something good, something useful with our lives. Try to be at peace with yourself, and help others share that peace. If you contribute to other people's happiness, you will find the true goal, the true meaning of life." – The Dalai Lama of Tibet

Both my uncle and aunt took their own lives. My uncle committed suicide by shooting himself in the heart when he was 24 (I was 5) and my aunt jumped out of the John Hancock, one of Chicago's tallest buildings, when she was 44 (I was 22). These were incredibly sad and traumatic events in my life, and though I have ideas about the cause of their deaths given my family history, I suppose I will never fully know why they ended their lives the way they did. Combined with the questions that all children and young adults grapple with, "Why am I here?" and "What am I to do with this gift called life?" add "Why does this gift called life seem more like a burden at times, and why hasn't my privileged life yielded me the happiness I so deeply desire?" For more on my family background, click on Grandpa Max.

I think that much of my pain and confusion came from trying to find answers to unanswerable questions. I have a mania for organization. Perhaps this is my way of superimposing order on a disorganized world. Each project I tackled gave me a way (I thought) to make sense of something, to find meaning to difficult feelings which seemed to be out of my control. And I found that the anxiety would lift when focused on the creation of a project with finite boundaries and the ardent pursuit of it. But ultimately, after the end of each project, I simply leaped to another, leaving me sometimes at terrible low points during the "in between" times. As my own spiritual path has deepened I have begun to see that a sense of meaning and purpose is directly related to being of service to others, and a huge source of happiness has been found by nurturing connections to friends and family. These are limitless pursuits that reward beyond measure.

Have I found all the answers of life's questions? Obviously not, but I now know that happiness is not a goal to attain, or a place to get to, but an experience found within each of us available at any moment.