The Rhythm of Joy

Machado de Assis once wrote, “There is no joy that does not pay alimony to sadness.” The saying lingers — a quiet murmur of inevitability — as though every moment of happiness were merely an advance on some future sorrow, a loan taken out against the certainty of loss.

But what if it were the other way around? What if sadness, inexorable as it may seem, were not a price to be paid, but rather the fleeting shadow cast by a joy that always, in time, finds its way back?

Life does not unfold in debts and punishments. There is no great celestial ledger where laughter is weighed against tears, no unseen hand ensuring that every happiness must be counterbalanced with sorrow.

What there is, instead, is movement — a rhythm, a cycle, a perpetual ebb and flow. Warmth and cold, presence and absence, elation and stillness. Sadness does not arrive as a debt collector; it arrives as a tide, shifting the landscape, reshaping the contours of who we are.

It strips away the old, makes space for the new. And in its passing, it prepares the ground where joy — stubborn, resilient, inextinguishable — will take root and bloom once more.

Perhaps it is not a matter of payment, but of progression. Like the day that does not truly vanish — only rests beyond the horizon of night. Like the tide that, even as it recedes, is already gathering itself for its inevitable return.

Sadness is not a punishment for joy; it is its counterpart, its counterbalance, the dark brushstroke that makes the light all the more vivid. It is the hush before the next swell of laughter, the breath held before release, the space between one heartbeat and the next in this strange, ceaseless rhythm we call living.

And if sadness must come, let it come without fear. Let it be recognised for what it is — not an end, not a loss, but a necessary passage, a moment in transit.

For no joy is ever truly lost, no tear ever shed without, within its quiet depths, holding the promise of a smile yet to come.