When I was a kid, my mother's parenting style teetered between benign neglect and intense bouts of violence.

When we strike a balance between the challenge of an activity and our skill at performing it, when the rhythm of the work itself feels in sync with our pulse, when we know that what we're doing matters, we can get totally absorbed in our task. That is happiness.

Some caregivers want to reciprocate the care they themselves received as children.

I don't know if my mother was a narcissist - or bi-polar or borderline. Those were words she tossed around over the years.

One thing that blocks flow is self-consciousness.

In all of my looking at happiness, one thing I noticed right away is that the opposite of happiness isn't unhappiness or even depression, it's anxiety. It is something that can constantly block our happiness, or our chance to reach that sort of meditative state in our work or our home lives.

They say change gets more difficult as we get older - each year we're more stuck in our ways, more reluctant to learn something new.