When No Amount of Love Can Change What Is

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about suffering, and about the way we experience pain when life unfolds differently than we hoped it would. Spiritual traditions have been examining this for thousands of years: how much of our suffering comes from what happens to us, and how much comes from our resistance to what is happening?

Much of this reflection has come from my recent experience with my sweet soul dog, Priya, who has been diagnosed with liver cancer and has a growing tumor. For the past decade, it’s been me and her traveling the world together, sharing life in such a deep and meaningful way. I always believed I would have many more years with her than I’m now being told I will. I gave her the highest quality food, the best health care and insurance, and the most love I possibly can. Over the past couple of years, I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on her health. I have done everything I could possibly do. And still, no matter what I do, her oncologist has told me we’ll have much less time together than I’d always envisioned.

There’s a particular kind of helplessness in loving someone so much and realizing that no amount of love, resources, or effort can change the circumstances. Being deep in this process with her, watching her body change, caring for her through all hours of the night while also grieving what’s coming, has brought me into very intimate contact with suffering.

Pain is unavoidable. We lose people we love. Things don’t work out as planned. Bodies change. Relationships end. Dreams fall apart. We become disappointed, afraid, uncertain, and heartbroken. We work hard to reach a destination only to find out it wasn’t actually meant for us. But layered on top of those experiences is often another kind of pain: the resistance to them. The belief that life should feel different than it does right now. The belief that if we love enough, do enough, spend enough, heal enough, or prepare enough, maybe we can bargain our way out of loss.

A few years ago, I published a book called A Heart Wide Open. The message behind it was learning how to keep your heart open even during the hardest experiences of your life. And to even find beauty and bliss within the suffering. I’m still learning what that means. Pain doesn’t magically become pleasant. Grief, fear, heartbreak, uncertainty, disappointment, and loss still hurt. But there’s an enormous difference between experiencing pain and closing yourself to life because pain exists.

We can choose to keep opening, or we can choose to number everything. And many choose the latter.

There can be beauty inside a difficult chapter. There can still be pleasure, connection, awe, laughter, love, and meaning. Your heart is capable of holding more than one thing at once. I can be devastated about Priya and still feel immense gratitude for the life we’ve shared together. I can ache over what’s happening and still feel grateful that I get to love her this deeply. I can be heartbroken and still be present and full of joy for the time we have now, even when most of it is no longer easy or pretty.

In Buddhism, there’s the concept of dukkha, often translated into English as “suffering,” although that translation can make it sound darker and narrower than it really is. Dukkha can also refer to dissatisfaction, unease, and the persistent feeling that something about the present moment should be different.

It’s that inner voice saying: this should not be happening. This is not how I wanted this to go. I did everything right. I should have had more time. Maybe that is part of what makes suffering so sharp. It’s not only the pain itself, but also our argument with reality.

Psychology has its own term. The “arrival fallacy” is the belief that reaching a particular goal will create lasting happiness. We imagine that when we finally get the thing we want, we will be secure, fulfilled, or complete. But humans adapt extraordinarily quickly. The thing you once prayed for becomes normal, and before long there’s another mountain in the distance, with your apparent happiness waiting at the top.

I don’t think this means we shouldn’t want things. I love desire. I love ambition. I love creating things, dreaming enormous dreams, exploring the world, falling in love with possibilities, and asking life for more. Desire is sacred. The problem comes when we ask the next achievement to answer a question it was never designed to answer: Who am I, and why am I here?

Hindu philosophy explores something similar through the idea of māyā, the veil of illusion. Māyā doesn’t necessarily mean that the world around us is fake. It points toward how easily we confuse what’s temporary with what’s infinite. Titles change. Bodies change. Relationships change. Money comes and goes. Careers evolve. Even the beings we love most are not ours to keep forever. None of those things are meaningless. They’re simply not stable enough to build your entire identity upon.

Yoga philosophy describes five kleshas, or forces that cloud our perception: avidya, misunderstanding the true nature of things; asmita, over-identification with the ego; raga, attachment to what we want; dvesha, resistance to what we don’t want; and abhinivesha, our fear of loss, change, and death.

What I love about these teachings is that they aren’t asking us to stop being human. They are asking us to notice how desperately we grip what feels good, how quickly we reject what feels uncomfortable, how much identity we build around who we think we are supposed to become, and how often we postpone being fully alive in this moment until some future version of life appears.

I decided a decade ago when I adopted Priya from an LA pound that she was going to be one of those tiny dogs who love very long, like 20 years plus. I told everyone this and repeated it for the past 10 years we’ve spent together. Now she’s turning 13 this month, and I might only have a very limited time left with her. No matter how many times we repeat something and convince ourselves it’s our reality, sometimes the Universe simply has other plans, and not everything can be in our control.

There’s something freeing about realizing that painful emotions aren’t evidence that your life has gone wrong. No one has the power to control everything. Billionaires die of cancer or unexpected circumstances too, they can’t pay or negotiate their way out of it. And I can’t love my way out of this.

You can be grieving and still be living pleasurably. You can be afraid and still be moving in the right direction. You can be heartbroken and still feel grateful. You can love someone deeply through the decline of their body and still allow the time you have together to be sacred, to still run through the park together and feel ecstatic.

Maybe the goal isn’t to construct a life where nothing hurts. Maybe it’s to become someone who can remain fully alive through the entire spectrum of being human, someone whose heart doesn’t close every time life becomes uncertain. Someone who understands that happiness isn’t a permanent emotional destination, but that meaning, love, beauty, contribution, connection, and presence can exist anywhere, at any moment.

Maybe your purpose today is creating something, caring for someone, helping an animal, telling the truth, making someone laugh when they desperately needed it, making art nobody sees, learning how to show up to love better, or simply experiencing this strange, beautiful life with your eyes and heart open. Your purpose can change because you change. Meaning doesn’t have to be one enormous mission written across the sky. Sometimes meaning is simply the way you show up to the world around you.

And perhaps that is why arriving never completely satisfies us. Because life isn’t asking us to arrive. It’s asking us to show up: to create, to love, to lose, to begin again, to notice, to contribute, to feel, to open, to become. There will always be another mountain. The freedom comes when you realize you do not have to spend your entire life standing at the bottom of one, convinced happiness is waiting at the summit. You are already in your life. This part counts more than anything.

I don’t know how much time I have left with Priya. I only know that I have today. And today, she is here. Today, I get to love her and hold her. Today, life is here, and I’m doing my best to fully show up for it, and accept it as it comes.