(A reflective journey into the space where joy and pain can sit side by side — and still feel whole.)
Go back, just for a moment, to the times in life when you have felt your heart stretch wide with happiness.
Not the casual happy — but the sacred happy.
The kind that fills your chest so deeply, you can feel life pour through you.
I’ll tell you a few of mine.
Holding my kids for the very first time.
Hearing they got into the colleges they dreamed of.
Realizing they had found their life partners — and feeling a joy that, somehow, was even bigger than the day I met mine.
Those moments didn’t just make me smile — they made me feel alive. They made everything make sense.
And then… there are the other moments.
The ones the heart doesn’t want, but life gives anyway.
Losing my dad.
Watching my mom carry grief, and knowing I couldn’t fix it.
Feeling the sting of my own children’s selfishness — not because they are bad, but because life was reminding me that love doesn’t guarantee understanding.
Those moments also made me feel deeply alive — but in a way that hurt.
A reminder that life is not a straight line of joy, but a rhythm of rise and fall.
For years I kept asking:
How do I stay happy forever?
How do I protect myself from the things that break me?
How do I control life so it doesn’t hurt so much?
But slowly — life taught me something else.
The goal was never to control anything.
The goal was to learn how to stay rooted no matter what comes.
And maybe that’s where spirituality quietly begins — not in escaping emotions, but in learning to hold them without losing ourselves.
Not in pretending pain doesn’t exist,
Not in clinging to joy as if it’s slipping away,
But in finding the space in between.
That small, steady space inside where you are not the happy moment, and you are not the sad one —
you are simply the one who experiences all of it.
There is a quiet witness within us who never breaks, never reacts, never runs —
the part of us that was there when we laughed,
and was still there when we cried.
The more we rest in that space, the less life feels like something we must survive —
and the more it feels like something we can fully live.
Not perfect.
Not painless.
Just deeply real.
A gentle call to you
Close your eyes tonight, and instead of asking:
“How can I stay happy forever?”
try asking:
“Can I make space for all of life — without losing myself?”
Because maybe true peace is not in controlling what happens,
but in meeting it all — with presence, softness, and trust.
That is where struggle begins to soften.
That is where stillness begins to grow.