The Reverend Clovis Jones and Texas Buddha were playing guitar. Amy listened while she babysat her infant cousin John Henry. At one point, the infant dropped a rattle outside the crib and began to cry. Amy reached for the rattle, “John Henry, you still have a crib full of toys. Why are you crying for the one thing you can’t have?”
Without stopping his playing Texas Buddha shouted, “Young John Henry is teaching you the ‘one moment glad, three moment sad’ rule.”
Sensing he might get a sermon out of it, Clovis stopped playing, rested his hands on his guitar and asked, “what is the ‘one moment glad three moment’ sad rule?
“Possessive desire can give us tunnel vision. When we obsessively desire something we do not have, it is hard to fully appreciate the wonderful things we do have, thus we are not as happy as we were before our desire to possess something. Then, when we obtain the object of our desire, we worry about losing it. That is our second moment of unhappiness. Finally, when the object of our desire passes, as all things do, we can again be made unhappy by remembering what we no longer have. That is the ‘one moment glad, three moments sad rule’.”
Amy objected, “But I don’t want to live without desire!”
“And you shouldn’t live without desire,” Texas Buddha agreed, “Just remember at all times that what you love belongs to life and not to you.”