We call life as "happy" or "sad" like it belonged to a single genre. But perhaps life is neither. Maybe it is a library of moments, and we mistake one chapter for the whole book.
No novel is written of only happy chapters. If it were, the joy would eventually become ordinary. Likewise, a book of nothing but tragedy would become unbearable. What gives each chapter its meaning is the chapter before it and the chapter after it.
Perhaps the same is true in life.
Laughing with my son on a quiet weekend morning does not erase the nights I spent worrying about bills. Neither do those worries diminish the beauty of that morning. Both belong to the same story, which I call "my life."
We often let our present emotion be the title of our entire life. When we are suffering, we say, "My life is miserable." When everything is going well, we say, "Life is beautiful." Yet both statements are written from only one page of a book that is still being written.
Maybe happiness and sadness are not genres at all. They are lovely contrasts designed to give much-needed color to our lives. Without silence, music is noise. Without the rain, a sunny day is just a sunny day. Without loss, we would rarely recognize the miracle of what remains.
The deepest and most meaningful lives are not the happiest ones. They are the ones who have learned to hold joy without denying sorrow, and to endure sorrow without forgetting joy.
Perhaps this is why they say "wisdom comes with age." As children, we judge life one day at a time. As adults, we begin to see patterns across the years. And perhaps only at the end can anyone truly understand the story as a whole.
So maybe the better question isn't "Is my life happy or sad?" The better question is "What chapter am I in?"
Because no reader closes a book halfway through and believes they already know the ending.
And maybe that's the hope hidden in every ordinary morning. No matter what yesterday's chapter contained, today hands us a blank page.
Some pages will be filled with laughter, others with tears. But none of them, by themselves, define us or our lives. For me, they are defined by our courage to just keep turning the page.
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