The Hyggelig Journey

Time does not slip away — it waits. Motionless, silent, watching. You say you have no time, yet time is always there, staring back at you. What you lack is not time, but intent — the courage to claim it, to shape it, to own it before it owns you. Ah, this tired habit of blaming the clock. As though time were something outside of you, pressing in, closing doors, slipping through your fingers. But time does not run, nor does it flee. It is you who rush past. You who look away. You who declare it lost when it was never anywhere but here. And time? Time watches. It sees you filling the hours with what must be done, what should be done, what you were told must be done. And you say you cannot, that it is impossible, that you are too busy. But busy with what, exactly? With the things you choose — knowingly or not — over the things you claim to long for. Yet before the ticking, before the measuring, before the universe itself, there was no time. No hours, no days, no waiting. Only ...

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 sp...