A couple of months back I was attending a recertification wilderness first responder course when someone in the class asked out loud "What is the key to Happiness? After sitting with it, I decided to give it a go: "I think the key to happiness is sadness". I got a weird look and follow up questions. What do you mean? I had just finished the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle & remembered the concept of how happiness and sadness exists based on a dualistic mindset of polar opposites. I continued my answer...."time is the only thing separating happiness from sadness, meaning that as we feel happy in one moment, we can be sure of that we will feel sad in another. Aka, sadness is the key to happiness. I will elaborate further. I used to wonder if I could just channel happiness all the time. Now I know that we cannot always feel happy. It is not possible. And that is okay. That is natural. Sometimes a situation is truly “sad", causing us to feel emotions of sadness. Yes, we cannot always feel happy, but we always have a choice to be peaceful. I say choice because it becomes a choice when we have the awareness to see that we have this choice. In fact, even if we do know, we don’t always remember that we have this choice. We are meant to process emotions, but we can make a huge shift just by applying some simple awareness to this process. First, we need to understand that we are not our emotions, that they do not belong to us, and they are just passing through. They are not ours to keep. We are allowing them to flow through us so they don't get trapped or stuck. Emotions want to move. They are called energy in motion. With this way of processing a situation, we allow to experience a situation fully and therefor tap into consciousness offering a state of peacefulness. A state of Being. A state of pure Love. When you experience such a state, happiness, in fact, becomes quite shallow. Curious to hear other thoughts...