Life is so ironic.
It takes sadness to appreciate happiness, noise to appreciate quiet, absence to appreciate presence. That is the contract we never signed but somehow agreed to. Joy means nothing until it has been interrupted. We do not understand light as a concept until we have sat in the dark for a while.
When happiness is continuous, we stop calling it happiness. We call it normal. Sadness is a teacher with terrible timing. It arrives uninvited and it makes everything sharper in its wake. After grief, a simple morning coffee tastes like a miracle. After heartbreak, a laugh with a friend feels like proof you are still alive.
We are not supposed to enjoy sadness, but we need it. Without it, happiness has no edges. It would be a flat white sky with no horizon. Sadness gives it a frame.
The world is loud. Not just traffic and televisions and phones buzzing. Loud with opinions, with worry, with to-do lists we recite to ourselves at 2 a.m. We crave quiet, but we rarely notice it when it is here all along. It takes the leaf blower next door stopping. It takes the kids leaving the house. It takes finally turning off the news to realize what quiet actually does.
Quiet is not empty. It is full. In quiet you can finally hear your own thoughts catch up to you. You can hear the house settle. You can hear your own breathing and remember, oh, I am still here.
We had to have the noise first to know what a gift that silence is. This is the hardest one. We are masters of taking presence for granted. The chair that is always occupied, the voice that always answers, the hand that always reaches for ours in the car. We assume it will always be there because it always has been.
Then there is a move. A graduation. A death. A falling out. An empty room where a life used to be.
And suddenly we understand. Presence was never ordinary. It was always extraordinary. We were just too close to see it.
Absence does not just teach us to miss people. It teaches us how to love the people who are still here better. It teaches us to look up from our phones. To linger a little longer at the table. To say the thing we keep thinking but never say out loud.
Life is ironic in this way on purpose. Not as a cruel joke, but as a kind of design. We are contrast creatures. We need winter to be grateful for summer. We need hunger to really taste food. We need getting lost to understand what it means to be found.
The irony is not that life is unfair. The irony is that the very things we try to avoid are the things that make the things we want feel real.
If you are in a noisy season, a sad season, a season of absence right now, it does not mean you have failed. It means you are right in the middle of learning the other side by heart, so when it returns, and it will return, you will not miss it this time.
“We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” – Romans 5:3-4
Being About The Journey 