Everyone wants to use happiness as a fix for problems, yet happiness is its own, very big thing, and it is selling happiness short to make it a fix for problems. To be happy is to experience life not as a series of struggles but as a gift, one that has no known limit. When you get the hang of being more interested in life than in agreeing with your thoughts, then you will get the life you get. And you will be able to have as much happiness as you want with almost no effort whatsoever. When you stop believing your thoughts, you look around just for you, just because it is interesting to look around. Some people call that enlightenment. But you won’t call it that. You’ll be too interested in the new view.
John Tarrant, The Paradox of Happiness
Awareness is born of intimacy. We can only fear what we do not understand and what we perceive from a distance. We can only find compassion and freedom in intimacy. We can be afraid of intimacy because we are afraid of helplessness; we fear that we don’t have the inner balance to embrace it without being overwhelmed. Yet each time we find the willingness to meet fear, we discover we are not powerless. Awareness rescues us from helplessness, teaching us to be helpful through our kindness, patience, resilience, and courage. Awareness is the forerunner of understanding, and understanding is the prerequisite to bringing suffering to an end.
Work can be fast and relentless: pressing deadlines, looming goals, endless meetings; email, phone calls, “to do” lists. At times we can feel out of control, as if driving a car with no breaks, rushing through our jobs holding onto difficult turns, cutting corners, racing through an occasional red light. We might even say to ourselves at the end of the day: “Hey, what just happened – I just spent my whole day at a job without noticing any of it!”….When we are mindful of our job’s speed and hecticness, we take a subtle step: we actually slow down in order to notice how fast we are going. By simply observing the speed mindfully, we have tapped the breaks, so to speak, and slowed down just a bit. 
