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This morning, before our regular Sunday morning group meditation, we ran into some friends who had to put their dog down yesterday. She was 13 and failing. She had some sort of tumor and she just wasn't going to get better. Both of them were quite upset, had spent most of yesterday crying, and part of this morning. I did not say to them, "Come on! The purpose of life is happiness! Buck up!"
Having happiness and fulfillment in one's life does not mean mood-making and forcing oneself into pretzels of false gaiety. When we have loss, when someone dies, when a pet passes, we mourn. As meditators, if anything, we may feel sorrow even more deeply than we have before. But sorrow and fulfillment are not mutually exclusive. There is a beauty, a poignancy to sadness when it comes so cleanly through a system that daily is steeped in joy, through a body that has shed the stresses of its history. This level of feeling is what we give each other in our best art, our best songs and poems, our best stories, films, plays; for only someone who has allowed themselves deeply to love can have a deep and true experience of mourning when loss occurs, as inevitably it must. Our capacity to mourn is testament to our willingness and our capacity to love. And when we go through loss, or look on as our brothers and sisters go through it, it makes what we have in our life today all the sweeter.
Today I will choose to love. Even knowing that one day it will end.
 Bison and Tana, Crow Indian Reservation, Montana
All material copyright Jeff Kober
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