Most people—perhaps, influenced by films or books—perceive life to be a single state of being. If something tragic is going on, it is only going to be that way, at all seconds of the day. A peculiar thing, which many fail to learn on time, is that a day is too broad, too large a chunk of time, regardless of how quickly it passes. All of it exists together; even the most stressful of days can use a joke or two, and no good memory exists in isolation—there is always some scuffle or trouble in all of them. All my days are chock full of emotions smouldered into one another to create a rather colourful alloy. And that is for the better because if life were really as it looks to be in films and books, it would be more tedious than we know it to be, and it is tedious enough already.
On days when I was listless and entirely out of my wits, I found joy in strangers and serendipity. And if there were no people around, even the sky does an excellent job lifting you up. And today was such a sky, in the middle of the month where nothing ever happens, over the city where nothing ever happens, the sky beamed and glowed with the brightest of blues, and now, it has turned pale again. But it was blue earlier, and what a blue it was! All of my days are brilliant in their own way, and all of them remind me of something tragic, and all of them are an amalgam of the two. And this is how life is, and this is how it always will be, as long as we don’t forget to laugh amidst tragedy and lament in happiness.
It is the simple irony of life: we are too small to understand the large things that happen to us. But we can, for all intents and purposes, keep an open mind.