Pain is often mistaken for an ending. When it arrives - sharp or slow, sudden or lingering - it convinces us that something has been broken beyond repair. We experience it as enclosure, as if the horizon has narrowed and the air itself has grown heavier. Yet pain is not a wall so much as a weather system. It moves through us, settles, intensifies, and, in time, shifts.
We resist pain because it unsettles our sense of control. It exposes how fragile our certainties are and how deeply we have allowed ourselves to care. But to care at all is to risk suffering. Pain, then, is not proof of failure - it is proof of attachment, of meaning, of having stepped fully into life rather than hovering safely at its edge.
There is a temptation to believe that relief must be grand in order to matter. We wait for transformation in sweeping gestures - for the clouds to part entirely. Yet experience suggests something quieter and more radical: one glimmer of happiness can break through a downpour of rain. The shift need not be dramatic. A moment of laughter, a shaft of light through a window, a kind word remembered - these are not trivial. They are interruptions in the narrative of despair.
Even the smallest spark of joy can quiet the loudest storm of pain. Joy does not silence suffering by force. It does so by coexistence. It reminds us that pain is not the whole of reality, only a part of it. When we allow even a fragment of warmth to stand alongside our grief, we begin to see that suffering does not possess absolute authority.
Breaking through pain is rarely a single decisive act. It is cumulative - a series of small permissions. The permission to feel without fleeing. The permission to hope without certainty. The permission to remain open when closing would feel safer. Each of these is a modest rebellion against despair.
In this sense, pain is less an adversary than a threshold. It marks the boundary between what was and what might yet be. To step through it is not to erase what hurt us, but to integrate it - to recognise that endurance is not hardness, but openness sustained over time. And in that openness, however fragile, light finds its way.