Take a moment of total honesty and ask yourself where the pain in your life is coming from. There are basically three choices.

The first is the Big Bang Theory. All things, including your irritating boss, have been caused by an event that conveniently has no cause itself. Your life, and all its tragedies, is simply a huge coincidence, as random particles from a very old explosion bump into each other, creating the face of every person you've ever met.

Or else there is a higher and infinitely compassionate intelligence that has created everything, and created it in such a way that we always lose everything to the agonies of old age, cancer, war, death.

Or else we get exactly what we give to others: a sort of perfect cosmic justice, as unforgiving as gravity. Let go of the coffee cup, it falls and breaks. Hurt someone else, you get hurt back.

All this, by the way, is not to say that there are no divine beings hovering around us constantly, guiding us toward perfect happiness. There are. But it cannot come unless we take care of others.