Relationships come and go into our lives. Someone once told me these words, but I didn’t understand the meaning until now. Depending where we are in life, there are people who stay for a long period time- say a lifetime because we need them; while others may stay for a short time. Although losing a person is not always an easy task to handle. Loss is loss. It’s that empty feeling of that person’s presence that stings our hearts. It takes time to readjust depending on how important that person was to your life. It’s in some ways much like trying to find happiness again. When I think about trying to rebuild happiness I’m reminded of the children’s book The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein.

In this book, Silverstein provides children the understanding of happiness, love, giving, and receiving. It encourages children to explore what it means to be happy, to love someone, and what we value. Simplistic terms, they’re often hard to remember as adults. Love is related to giving, children are encouraged to recognize emotions and how to identify them. With happiness, children learn that the main characters of the book: a boy and the tree. The tree loves the boy so much that it wants to see the boy happy. The Giving Tree offers the thinking that the tree loves the boy selflessly while the boy loves the tree because of what the tree means to his life.

Relationships aren’t always easy. Going back to the basics of recognizing the emotions of love and happiness, No matter what role a person has in our lives, or how long that person will stay in our lives it all a question of time, but also timing. Where that person fits in our lives, we’re meant to feel and to be in touch with our emotions no matter if we live in a small town or a big city. Like The Giving Tree, relationships offer us the ability to feel and to appreciate what life has to offer us. I think back to the words of Ethan Zuckerman: “Engineering serendipity is this idea that we can help people come across unexpected but helpful connections at a better than random rate. And in some ways it’s based on trying to reassess this notion of serendipitous as lucky – to think of serendipitous as smart.”