Welcome to the Happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. There's something that happens in life that I bet you've noticed in your own life. We have periods of time, maybe not often, but every once in a while, where life is just going well.

We like our work, we like our relationships, the people that we love are doing okay,

we don't have any health concerns, and everything seems to be just doing well. And then life, as it

always does, figures out a way to mess up our lives and we go back to our

worries, our fears, and all the trepidation that we've had so much throughout our lives.

It's just when things go well, something's going to come along and destroy it.

And instead of these being unique occurrences, these are the mainstay of life.

An incredibly beautiful and exquisite example of this in written form is the book called

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. I just finished reading it for the second time, and it truly

is an exquisite book. It won both the

Pulitzer Prize and she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The book is about a poor

Chinese farmer whose name is Wei Long, and though he starts off being a poor rural farmer,

he marries a woman called Ulaan, and for a while his luck begins to really change for the better.

But then, tragedy hits. There's a major trout, and he and his family almost die.

But they are able to survive that, and he's able to get back to his land, to grow his farm, buy more land,

and he ends up becoming a very wealthy landowner. And you would

think with these vicissitudes of life that as he gets older, as he gets wealthier, things get

better. But they don't. He makes bad choices where he really hurts his wonderful wife,

Ulan, and then his children make poor choices, and then he has a corruptible

uncle who really creates havoc in his life, and then there's a war, and then there's fighting

between his children, and it just goes on and on and on. And even when he's just about ready to die,

he gets so upset because his kids behind his back, he overhears him saying

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