“The Unbearable Lightness of Being” It is the title of a novel by Milan Kundera, that often presents a paradox so often manifested in everyday life.

Life is so light in its everyday mundane simplicities, whilst simultaneously being something so burdensome and heavy.

Light and heavy, two interrelated concepts which are merely extremes of one another.

I think life’s occurrences are similar to droplets of water. They’re typically light and small, but as they accumulate, the weight of it all accumulates to the point of overflow.

Often times I am stopped in my tracks in utter wonder when my small child tells me what a horrible day it’s been. What in the world could a 7-year-old deem horrible in his uncomplicated carefree existence? When I inquire, it turns out the game of handball at recess didn’t quite turn out as expected. In fact, the game is reckoned to have been so horrible that it was “the worst day ever”. I smile in amusement and can only wish I were in his place.

Of course, everything is relative.

I could go on to complain about a million things that REALLY DO take the grand prize of an ultimate unfortunate event  (in my perspective), but do they really matter in the grand scope of life as we know it?

How many worse things are there out there that I have not been exposed to, such as world hunger, homelessness, war violence? Now that would be unbearable, and even then – us humans are so adaptable to our surroundings. Whatever the case may be, we are resilient, we grow invisible shields, we are rocks against the worst tempest.

I remember a time when I grew accustomed to domestic violence. The pain became welcome in my frail body. Sometimes I felt it a necessity to remind me I was alive. The blows to my head - a symbol of anger that later morphed into love.

We live in paradoxes; it is all encompassing, and we adapt to the heaviness of the simple lightness of BEING.