Both sides to balance

“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”

— Carl G. Jung

How often do you hear people say “look on the bright side?” or how often do you say it yourself?

It is one of those idioms that gets thrown around a lot and as a result, grows to have little lasting effects on individual perspectives on life.

Similar to the common saying “everything is going to be alright,” half the time people say this, they are just trying to be polite and sympathetic and the people on the receiving end often do not feel uplifted by it.

However, these seemingly sounding worthless expressions hold significant value when one sits to let the underlying meaning set in.

As the quote from Jung above says, “Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness.” Few are able to distill the concept of a force needing an opposite and equal force to exist for balance.

Newton’s third law explores this:

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Although the laws of physics are greatly out of context here, this law still applies because in both cases, what all forces aim to achieve is to leave an equal impact, which is designed to create a balance.

Think about it. How can we quantify and understand joy without having experienced pain?

Why is it that the deepest form of sadness makes one laugh and the deepest form of happiness makes one cry?

Like light and darkness needing each other to be relevant, known sadness makes happiness meaningful, otherwise what we have is non-existent, undefined.

Like that song that says that one only misses the sun when it starts to snow, one can only truly understand and appreciate life when there's an acknowledgement of both sides of things which thrives together to create a balance.

So yes, in all situations, even when seemingly terrible, we have to look on the bright side!

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