There’s an old Chinese story about a woman whose only son had died. She went to a holy man and asked him for something that would bring her son back. But instead, the wise old man told her to bring him a mustard seed from a home that had never known sorrow, and he would use it to drive away her grief. So she set off in search of the magical seed. But wherever she turned, in hovels and in palaces, she found one tale after another of sadness. And in each place she thought to herself: “Who is better able to help these unfortunate people than I, who have had misfortune of my own?” Eventually, she became so engrossed in ministering to other people’s grief that she forgot about her own quest for the magical mustard seed, never realising that it had, in fact, driven the sorrow out of her life.