Two days after we buried my wife, I returned to my classroom. I still lack the words to describe that solitary walk from the parking lot to the building and then down the hall to my dark room. It had been more than a month since I had been there. Jane had been alive and we had no idea how serious the damage to the valves in her heart had become. My brothers had gone back home after the funeral.

I turned the key in the lock–and as I did, a string of lights came on against the far wall. They illuminated both my journalism and AP students and the letters they had constructed on the wall: WELCOME HOME. In that moment my heart was lightened, and I realized my students had absorbed at least the first, second, and third dicta that had driven both Jane’s life and my own: The first was unconditional love; the second, logic and reasoning; the third is best expressed in the words of Spider Robinson: “Shared pain is decreased; shared joy is multiplied.”

There was a time both Jane and I were avid collectors of quotes that phrased the pieces of what we believed and lived more effectively than we could express them ourselves. One of our students referred to the quotes on Jane’s wall as the “Old Wall of Wisdom.” We tried to avoid duplication since we shared many students. I got to keep the Robinson quote because I had used it for years–and because it was the driving vision of the newspaper staff.

Our students had seen my pain. Many had come to both the wake and the funeral. They had expressed their sympathies in the ancient rituals. Some graduates had come by the house afterwards and sat with me for a time after the funeral. But the current students had other plans. That morning, they reminded me that I was family. In sharing my grief and trying to do something others would not have thought to do, they had decreased my pain.

Their actions that morning were prompted by love and they had used their powers of logic and reason to find the best way to welcome me back into the school and my classroom and their lives. Young as they were, they had seen our lives and how we lived them. Those lessons had, for some of them, begun long before the encountered us. Our example had only strengthened those ideas. For others watching us had been their first introduction to a way of life based on more than simple self-interest.

The Robinson quote is, however, a derivative of the first two principles. Its compassion grows from love, but its expression is based on observation, logic and reasoning. Love prompts the action, but the action taken is derived from the observation of many human interactions. When we express our pain to others, the burden of it–at least momentarily–lightens. When one of us celebrates, all those around desire to take part in that celebration. When we act intentionally to draw out pain or celebrate another’s joy, that becomes a logical act of love.

And that combination of positive emotion and logic creates a powerful goodness.