Anything that has meaning for us - anything that matters - carries the potential to cause us pain. Meaning is a brightly coloured box with pain inside. And sometimes - without us wanting it to - the lid just bursts open and the pain comes pouring out. The problem is that meaning - things mattering - is attachment. And anything that we're attached to has the potential to turn round and bite us. The Buddhists do a big thing on attachment. And you can see why. It's their equivalent of sin. Freedom from attachements takes you a good way down the road to total liberation.