The Hollow Where Joy Once Sat On Happiness, Loss, and the Ancient Search for God

It begins, I think, with the soft breath of a newborn against your neck. Or the tiny, milk-scented paw of a kitten batting at a sunbeam on your kitchen floor. These small, tender things—a child’s laugh, the arc of the sun lifting the frost off the trees, the warmth of a beloved body next to yours in bed—these are the moments we call happiness.

But then one day, the house is quiet. The kitten has grown old and wandered away to die beneath a tree. The child no longer reaches for your hand. The sun comes up and you barely notice, because the person you once watched it with is gone.

And what remains is a hollow place. The very space once occupied by joy is now inhabited by longing.

Why is it, then, that we so often tether our happiness to these external things—people, animals, experiences—and when they are taken away, we fall apart? Is this some cruel design flaw in our human programming, or is it a sacred invitation we’ve been misreading all along?

Hindu philosophy, particularly the teachings found in the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, offers a kind of tender clarity here. According to these ancient texts, the Self—Atman—is eternal, untouchable by birth or death, untouched by joy or grief.

True happiness, or Ananda, is not found in the fleeting world of forms and changes, but in communion with the unchanging, the divine. And yet, here we are, weeping into our coffee mugs because the dog we loved is no longer curled at our feet.

It’s not that the puppy isn’t real. Or the child. Or the love. They are real in the way dreams are real—felt deeply, lived fully, but impermanent by nature.

We suffer not because we loved them, but because we believed they were the source of our joy.

This is what Krishna gently tells Arjuna on the battlefield: “You grieve for those who should not be grieved for. The wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead.” Not because they’re heartless, but because they’ve seen beyond the veil. Because they’ve discovered that what we’re actually mourning isn’t the loss of the object—but the way it once reflected back to us a glimpse of the divine. A glimpse of our own completeness.

Think of the kitten again. What did it awaken in you? A tenderness, a presence, an awe that you rarely touch in your ordinary day. The sunrise reminds you that something vast and golden is watching. Your child’s laughter breaks down the barriers you’ve built inside your own chest.

These things don’t give you joy. They remind you of joy. They point you back to your natural state.

But we forget. And so we keep chasing the sun, mistaking the beam for the source.

In Hindu cosmology, this is the dance of Maya—illusion. We wander through the world believing that the forms we see are real and permanent, and when they disappear, as they must, we cry out in pain. Maya isn’t evil; she is, in some ways, the great teacher. Through her, we come to realize that we have placed our hope in shadows.

It was once written that “pain reaches a point and does not get worse. The body does not break, though the heart does.” And maybe the breaking of the heart is necessary—not as punishment, but as initiation. It is the crack that lets the truth in. The truth that we are already whole, already divine, already home.

To break the cycle, we have to stop running from the ache. Instead, we turn toward it—not as victims, but as pilgrims. We sit in the empty room where the laughter once rang, and we ask the silence what it’s here to teach us. We look at the empty dog bed, not as proof of something stolen from us, but as a doorway into the eternal presence that the dog once pointed to.

The great sages tell us that happiness is not a feeling, but a realization. It is not found, but remembered. It is not granted by the world, but revealed in its absence.

So perhaps yes—it is in our intrinsic nature to experience this dance of gain and loss, joy and sorrow, not as a flaw but as a sacred curriculum. So that finally, exhausted by the chase, we may stop, sit, and see that the source of all joy has been within us all along.

And then, in the quiet, we may hear again the echo of that kitten’s purr, the child’s laugh, the song of the sunrise—not as something lost, but as something eternal. Something never separate from us, not really. Just the divine, playing hide and seek, and calling us home.

Hari Om Tat Sat