Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. This morning I woke up and my

cousin contacted me telling me that her sister who had been struggling with cancer

for a few years now died.

If we live long enough, we're all going to face death.

Death of our parents, death of our relatives, death of our friends, perhaps even death of our children. We are going to face

death and the ultimate death we're going to face is that of our own. But perhaps,

perhaps death has something to teach us to help us to live much better and find happiness

in this life, given that we are all going to face death. That's what we're going to explore in this

podcast because I think death does have much to teach us. Unfortunately, here's

what happens. After we're born and we start having experiences, we think we're going to live forever.

There really is a sense of, I'm not going to die. I'm going to live forever. But I remember when I was in high school, there was a friend of mine. He was a great above me, but he was still a friend of mine.

And he had been driving home from seeing his girlfriend, and I actually saw him drive by and a little bit later he got in a car

rack because he was pretty upset after breaking up with his girlfriend and he crashed his car and

died. And I remember the effect that had had on my friends, I had experienced death prior to this, but many of them hadn't.

And knowing that one of our friends had died, shook them up and they realized, oh, we're not going to live forever. We may die

too someday. And that realization isn't always a bad thing, because unfortunately what happens

when we do take on that sense of I'm permanent I'm going to live forever

What happens is we stop living well

We stop living in the present moment and really stop seeing things.

There's a sense of really taking things for granted, assuming that they're going to be there forever,

and stop seeing the beauty in the things that are present. Once we get something and we have it, we really stop

seeing it. There's a saying that I love. Once I've seen a sparrow, I stop seeing it anymore. or once I've seen a flower, I've stopped seeing it

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