Robert Norman Ross was an American painter and art instructor Standing in front of a wet canvas on television, a soft-spoken painter in a denim shirt painted a stroke of dark brown paint onto a bright landscape. He looked directly into the camera and offered a quiet thought:“The very fact that you're aware of suffering is enough reason to be overjoyed that you're alive and can experience it.”The sentence sounds strange when you first hear it. Society usually treats pain as a problem—something to fix, hide, or cure with medicine. Yet Bob Ross points to a simple truth about human...