"Well I'm dying..." *sips coffee* "faster than everyone else, that is". Those are the first words I heard from this girl a few years ago when I came across her Youtube video. Than I found out she passed away this week. I followed her journey with cystic fibrosis here and there, listening to her TED Talks and following her all the way to her final moments on Instagram. The impact of her words have inspired me as much as a Dalai Lama book, because to me they were such simple truths about life. It embodied everything I read about but failed to put into practice all these years. In the perspective of happiness, Claire said that happiness is purely an release of dopamine, a chemical process. And that life is is more often than not, extremely mundane and routine. One of my favorite concepts she talks about is this concept of viewing problems as neutral. That there is no "fairness god" in this world giving out easy rides to anyone. And I remembered one of her TED talks:

"There's this awesome saying that I love that you will never truly get what you want until you want what you have. And, you know, at first, I didn't really like that saying because I'm like, "wait -- no, no, no -- I don't want what I have -- you know you want to have more! Right? You don't like want what you have. That's like messed up. But when you start thinking about it, when you ... no matter what you have, you're always going to be wanting to have something more. It's kind of human nature."

About wanting more than this. Wanting more than this job, this car, this house, this problem, that problem, this illness. And what I've been trying to tell myself and people for years is there is no final destination. There's only one day at a time. There is no elusive level of life that puts you in an automatic state of bliss, no matter what. And to me, she really helped clarify the "no matter what" part. That in this very moment, nothing bad is actually happening. And that should be enough, because if our minds kept hurrying to the next day, next month, next year, before we know it we are at the end of life wondering why we are still unsatisfied. 

"Right in this moment, we are here together. Right this second it's great."

So instead of asking, what ELSE should I have that I don't? Where else can I struggle harder to achieve that I haven't got to yet? The question is, this is what I have and what can I do with it?