and bad news. Which do you want first?

We defer travel, worried about the expense.

We surrender vacation days, afraid we’ll lose our place in the hierarchy of success.

We gaze enviously at others’ Facebook posts, anxious that our lives don’t seem as good.

We’re overwhelmed at times in an avalanche of loss and grief, when it seems we’ll never know unfettered happiness again.

Which is why I recommend this shared wisdom:

“Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.”

“The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.”

“Our ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this is called, in the one instance, hope, and in the other, uncertainty of the following day.”

“The certainty of death opposes it: for it places a limit on every joy, but also on every grief.”

That’s Primo Levi from his book on his own experiences, Survival in Auschwitz.

Read it this summer. It’ll put your life into perspective…