To be human is to live between two silences – the one before birth and the one after death. Between them stretches a brief, shimmering interval called life, filled with music and dissonance, laughter and ache. We walk this narrow bridge between joy and sorrow, light and shadow, and in that very balance lies the beauty of being alive.
Albert Camus once wrote, “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” That invincible summer – that inner flame which refuses to die – is what the Bhagavad Gita calls the Atman, the self untouched by fortune or loss. When Arjuna falters on the battlefield of doubt, Krishna reminds him that the soul is eternal, unshaken by circumstance. The true battleground, then, is not outside us, but within – between fear and faith, between the pull of desire and the whisper of wisdom.
Suffering is not an error in the design of existence; it is the pulse of awakening. The Buddha, sitting beneath the Bodhi tree, saw that dukkha – suffering, impermanence, and unsatisfactoriness – is woven into the fabric of life. Yet he also taught that liberation lies not in denial but in awareness. “Pain is certain,” he said, “suffering is optional.” The wound is inevitable; what is optional is our attachment to it. When we stop resisting life’s impermanence, suffering loses its sting and becomes the raw material of freedom.
Joy, too, is not the absence of sorrow but its twin. Khalil Gibran understood this when he wrote, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” Joy is not always loud or luminous; it often comes quietly, in the pause between two storms – in the laughter that escapes through tears, in the grace that follows surrender.
Rabindranath Tagore captured this balance with haunting simplicity:
“Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers,
but to be fearless in facing them.
Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain,
but for the heart to conquer it.”
Freedom, then, is not escape from life’s contradictions but participation in them with open eyes. The Gita calls it nishkama karma – to act with full heart and yet remain unattached to outcome. Epictetus, the stoic philosopher, echoed this across continents and centuries when he said, “No man is free who is not master of himself.” Freedom is not given by destiny or denied by suffering; it is the stillness with which we meet what is.
There is another kind of freedom, gentler and more enduring – the freedom to love life despite its fragility. To look at the world, knowing it will one day vanish, and still say yes. This is not resignation but grace. It is what Tagore called ananda, the quiet joy that rises when we stop grasping and begin to live in presence. It is the light that flickers not in victory, but in acceptance.
We walk, then, across the uneven floor of existence – sometimes dancing, sometimes stumbling, yet always moving. The cracks beneath our feet are not flaws; they are the lines through which light enters.
To be human is to hurt, to hope, and to rise again. To carry sorrow without surrendering to it. To taste joy without clutching at it. To live, fully and freely, in the space between the two silences.
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An ordinary life 
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