This story from China is one of my favorites:
A woman injures her foot and is at a loss about how to control the pain. So she takes a hammer and sticks her foot through the hole.
Soon after a friend comes to visit and seeing her leg in the hole in the wall asks, "What are you doing?"
The woman explains, "My foot was hurting so much that I thought that if I could just put it in my neighbor's house it wouldn't any longer have anything to do with me."
Sometimes I have felt like doing what the poor woman did. If only I could give my pain to someone else.
The woman was right in her desire -- who wants to suffer? But her solution was no solution at all. Her foot still hurt and she caused a problem for her neighbor.
Where once there had been a single problem, now there were two. Not only had she not solved problem of her throbbing foot, she created a mess for someone else as well.
This book of epigraphs, aphorisms and parables is meant to illuminate how to address some of life's pain. Of course, the pain I am talking about is spiritual -- or psychic or philosophical, if you prefer.
I start with the belief that all rational people want to be happy. I further believe that happiness is achievable through self-cultivation. And finally, I believe that proper self-cultivation is not self-centered but other--centered.
In other words, happiness requires that we take care of ourselves, but we can take care of ourselves only as we care for others at the same time. Here I am following the paths to enlightenment set down in the ancient world by Confucius and Aristotle and countless others across continents and millennia.
There is nothing new that I say here, but every age needs to be reminded of what is truly important. Try it out for yourself. If you find it useful, then I am happy.