I recall other, similar moments when I thought I was experiencing what self-help books and greeting cards call happiness, but is in fact a kind of mercy: permission from yourself for everything to be all right in spite of everything, a state in which even the heaviness that came before was part of something larger, has meaning by negation, is a dark side indispensable to reaching lightness, a shadow already hanging over me again – since the lightness, as I’ve learned from experience, never lasts but segues into a new heaviness.
