We have a strange habit of putting life into two boxes.
Good or bad.
Success or failure.
Happy or sad.
Blessed or cursed.
Heaven or hell.
Perhaps it makes life easier to understand that way.
But life rarely cooperates.
Between heaven and hell, there are a zillion worlds.
There is the world where you are doing reasonably well but still wake up wondering what exactly you are doing with your life.
There is the world where you have people who love you, yet occasionally feel terribly alone.
There is the world where you achieve something you once desperately wanted, hold it in your hands, and discover that happiness has somehow failed to arrive with it.
There is the world where nothing is particularly wrong, but nothing feels particularly right either.
And there is the curious world where life is objectively difficult, yet you laugh over a stupid joke, enjoy a cup of tea, watch the evening sky, and—for five minutes—feel completely fine.
What do we call these worlds?
We usually don't.
We have plenty of words for the extremes.
When something wonderful happens, we call ourselves fortunate. When everything collapses, we call it misery. But ordinary human existence occupies a vast territory for which our vocabulary often seems inadequate.
A disappointing Monday can contain a beautiful sunset.
A successful year can contain lonely nights.
A terrible month can contain one unforgettable conversation.
A person can be grateful and dissatisfied at the same time.
You can love your life and still want parts of it to change.
Contradictions do not necessarily cancel each other out. Sometimes they simply coexist.
Perhaps that is where we make life unnecessarily difficult. We keep asking for a verdict.
Am I happy?
Am I successful?
Is my life good?
As though, somewhere, there is a clerk maintaining our cosmic balance sheet and waiting to stamp one of two words across it.
APPROVED.
REJECTED.
But a life cannot be copyedited into that kind of binary neatness.
Some sentences remain complicated.
Some chapters refuse to tell us whether they are tragedies or comedies until much later.
And some never tell us at all.
I have begun to think that happiness itself is not a permanent country where the fortunate eventually obtain citizenship. It is probably closer to a place we keep visiting.
Sometimes for years.
Sometimes for an afternoon.
Sometimes for the length of a song.
The same may be true of sadness.
We enter. We stay. We leave. We return.
Meanwhile, life continues in all those unnamed territories between them.
We work.
We worry.
We pay bills.
We make plans that fail.
We make other plans that unexpectedly work.
We lose people.
We meet people.
We become important to someone without realising it.
We disappoint ourselves.
We forgive ourselves.
We laugh at inappropriate moments.
We stare at ceilings at 2 a.m.
We wake up the next morning and somehow continue.
Perhaps heaven and hell were never the most interesting destinations anyway.
Perhaps the real story of being human happens in the zillion worlds between them: the messy, contradictory, occasionally beautiful places where a person can be wounded without being destroyed, successful without being satisfied, lonely without being unloved, and uncertain without being lost.
We spend so much time trying to reach heaven and so much energy trying to escape hell that we sometimes forget to look around.
This strange little world between them?
For now, this is where we are.
And there is still so much here to see.
#LifeReflections #BetweenTheExtremes #HumanExperience
