Where Joy and Sadness Meet: A Birthday, A Season, A Choice

March Memories

March brings the International Day of Happiness, a phrase that can feel deceptively simple, because happiness, in real life, isn’t constant. More often, it lives in fleeting moments, in choosing to notice what is already here.

For me, March embodies this truth. It is a month of contradictions, and a reminder that joy and sadness can exist side by side without needing to resolve them. I feel privileged to honour happiness in my own way, through the choices I make each day. My dad used to say there’s no such thing as a problem, only a situation requiring a solution, and that wisdom has travelled with me ever since. The contradictions March carries, and my decision to choose happiness within them, feel like my way of responding to what I cannot change.

Ten years ago this March, I lost my dad, just four days after my birthday. Grief changes how we see the world and how we experience everything that follows. In the beginning it feels impossibly heavy, as though light moments may never exist again without the shadow of loss. Over time, though, grief changes shape. It no longer stops life, but lives alongside it. It still appears unexpectedly, but it sits beside joy rather than replacing it.

I have always loved my birthday, another reason to celebrate being alive. After losing Dad, I feared it might become something I dreaded, a date marked only by absence. But I believe happiness is, in part, a choice. We cannot control what happens to us, or who we lose along the way. So, when my birthday arrives, I choose to celebrate, I choose to be present.

Celebration is not a counterbalance to grief; it is its companion, a way of honouring life even when it is complicated, and proof that life does continue after loss, even when it isn’t perfect.

A birthday can also be a moment of acknowledgement rather than achievement. A pause to recognise the year that has been lived, in all its ordinariness, growth, challenge and change. Less about adding another year, and more about honouring the courage it takes to keep showing up for our own lives, and recommitting to what matters most.

March, with its subtle shifts, makes this choice toward joy feel a little easier. The days stretch as the Spring Equinox arrives, that brief point of balance between light and dark.  The air softens, the world begins to stir again, and comfort returns through the ordinary: familiar routines, simple moments, what I like to think of as micro-joys. First coffee in daylight, a walk without my coat zipped to my chin, windows cracked open to the first hint of spring. Joy does not always look like happiness, but it anchors us in the small experiences we are given each day. The equinox reminds us that brightness does not erase shadow, and shadow does not cancel light, both belong and both move us forward.

March also brings moments that honour women through International Women’s Day and Mother’s Day. I am a passionate advocate for the strength, equity and possibility of women’s lives. These days draw attention to the care women give, the resilience they carry, and the ways they shape families, communities and each other, often quietly, but profoundly.

Maybe that is what March teaches us: not to choose between joy and grief, but to let them sit at the same table. We spend so much energy trying to create perfection in our emotions, our lives, our relationships and yet perfection does not exist. What does exist are the small moments, the people who matter, and the life we are living now. That, in itself, is always worth noticing.