Walt Disney once said “For every laugh, there should be a tear.”

One minute you are laughing with the seven dwarfs in the forest, the next you are crying as Snow White lies comatose from a poisoned apple. One minute Bambi and Thumper are laughing and playing on the “stiff water,” the next Bambi is crying over her mother’s death. One minute you are laughing and “expectorating” with Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, the next you are crying as Belle’s Dad languishes behind bars.

I describe it many ways. A happy sadness, a delicious agony, like licking honey off a razor’s edge. Life—and therefore art—is an endless cycle of paradox. Shakespeare created Falstaff (the height of all comic achievement in literature) and with the same pen he created the tragic hero Hamlet.

How can Van Gogh portray the jubilant yellows in his masterpiece Sunflowers, and only two years later tragically take his own life at the age of 37?

A laugh, a tear, a laugh, a tear… Many times when I am experiencing the adrenaline and joy of a new adventure or foreign land, I am moved to sadness, because my Mom cannot see the same. I savor the beauty of a magnificent sunset and perfect day, only to feel a tinge of sadness at the passing of it.

Henri Nouwen puts it this way in his wonderful book The Dance of Life, “Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment…In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of its limitations. In every success, there is a fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance. And in all forms of light, there is knowledge of surrounding darkness.

Joy and sadness are as close to each other as the splendid colored leaves of a New England fall to the soberness of the barren trees…Joy and sadness are born at the same time, both arising from such deep places in your heart that you can’t find words to capture your complex emotions.”

Many of us experience this paradox of joy and sorrow throughout life without ever arousing words to verbalize it.

I think we should deal with it openly. I do not propose a solution to the paradox. I do not say that life is meaningful in spite of defeat and disappointment, nor do I point to despair and proclaim the worthlessness of our hopes. Rather I affirm the paradox and challenge you with it.

Why Is It That Behind Every Laugh, There Lies A Tear?