Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.

We often confuse what we wish for with what is.

So, here we are, all of us poor bewildered darlings, wandering adrift in a universe too big and too complex for us, clasping and ricochetting off other people too different and too perplexing for us, and seeking to satisfy myriad, shifting, vague needs and desires, both mean and exalted. And sometimes we mesh. Don't we?

- Attributed to <i>James Flynn, Ph.D. </i>

Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need.

We suffer by wanting different things often at odds with one another, but we suffer even more by wanting to want different things.

We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.

"The same strength which has extended our power beyond a continent has also interwoven our destiny with the destiny of many peoples and brought us into a vast web of history in which other wills, running in oblique or contrasting directions to our own, inevitably hinder or contradict what we most fervently desire. We cannot simply have our way, not even when we believe our way to have the "happiness of mankind" as its promise."

No story sits by itself. Our lives connect like threads on a loom, interwoven in ways we never realise.

Those who understand the complexities of human nature know that joy and pain, ugliness and beauty, love and hate, mercy and cruelty and other conflicting emotions often blend and cannot be separated from each other.

We constantly walk around thinking, “I need this,” or “I need that,” trapped in the web of desires. Happiness is the state when nothing is missing.

We are not accustomed to thinking that God's will for us and our own inner dreams can coincide.

Desire is not simple. In Greek the act of love is a mingling and desire melts the limbs. Boundaries of body, category of thought, are confounded.

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud,if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues.

Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.