Camus wrote this line in a short essay called “Love of Life,” describing a woman dancing in a Spanish cabaret. He had been traveling, stripped of the routines and distractions that normally cushion us from raw experience. In that unguarded state, he noticed something: the more intensely he felt life’s beauty, the more sharply he felt its fragility. The two feelings were not opposites. They were the same feeling, viewed from different angles.

This is one of the absurd’s most counterintuitive gifts. We tend to believe that happiness requires the elimination of suffering, that if we could just solve enough problems, we would arrive at some uncomplicated joy. But Camus observed the reverse. The people who love life most fiercely are often those who have stared hardest at everything that makes it painful. Their love is not naive. It is informed.

Think about what you cherish most. Its value is inseparable from the fact that it will not last. The meal tastes better because hunger is real. The reunion means something because absence preceded it. Despair is not the enemy of love. It is the soil love grows in.

Today, instead of trying to outrun the hard parts of being alive, notice how they sharpen the good ones. Your capacity for joy is not diminished by sorrow. It is forged there.