We can ask for, participate in and commit to getting the full and direct experience that is love. After all, to love someone truly is to be interested and willing to create the experience that is love for them, and thus to become truly bilingual in the language of the heart.

Ideally, we delegate responsibility for menial tasks in order to free ourselves up to do more meaningful work. But in the case of computers, we are turning over the tasks of life to technology in order to free ourselves to do what?

What is it we really need when we are in pain? I believe that it is much simpler than we imagine. We need to be heard, understood and cared about. We need a friend to hold our pain with us, for a moment, without judgment, to hear and care about how we are, in truth.

Anyone who has ever practiced mindfulness knows that there is something akin to a wild animal living inside each of us. We call that wild animal "mind."

When we can be honest about a friendship, and about the season of life that the friendship belongs in, then, we can be truly grateful for the miracle that a friendship is. Trying to force a friendship to keep bearing fruit past its season is a disservice to its profound nature.

Spirituality is not about becoming the person that you are supposed to be, or about doing the "spiritual" thing. To be spiritual is to compassionately welcome your truth -- what you actually feel -- whether you like that truth or not.

It is crucial that we stay grounded in some kind of permanence, not a personal permanence, but the permanence of the human journey. Ultimately, in order to stay anchored, we need more than just hashtags.

We are trained to be grateful for getting the things we want, but we can and need to become equally grateful for the things that we don't get, and the wonderful and unexpected opportunities and gifts that those absences bestow upon us.

When we have a friendly relationship with ourselves, when we can listen kindly to our own experience and take our own side, we are far more likely to take action and risk the unknown.

In life, the person you spend the most time with is yourself. You are always in your own company. Why not keep company with someone who loves you as opposed to someone who does not particularly like you, or worse?

Here and now are our birthrights -- like life. Do we need to do anything in this moment to be alive? No. Life takes care of life. Do we need to do something to be in now? No. It is already -- and always -- now. It can only ever be now.

I speak to people for a living, so I feel somewhat qualified to make the following claim: There are people who do indeed enjoy small talk, but many people hate it. Regardless of where we fall on the spectrum, however, there is an enormous pressure to engage in it.

Even when we have what we want, we still can't land in this moment. We cling to the illusion that there are indeed a set of circumstances that, once we achieve them, will finally, miraculously make this moment inhabitable.