There is darkness, too, and we do gain strength

When she told me what her Mother had said about Burn After Reading, that it was the darkest movie she'd seen in awhile, it reminded me of something I'd thought when I first started hanging out with her. I'd been thinking about her cheerful disposition, her slightly naive view of the world, and I'd thought that I didn't want to bring darkness into her world. She may have had a somewhat sheltered outlook, but her naivete gave her a charmingly innocent-seeming personality, a certain joy. After giving it more thought, though, I realised that in some ways hers is a world of darkness. There are dark things, sad, tragic things in this world. As there is light, so is there shadow. To shield oneself from those things is to blind oneself. We gain strength by confronting these things. Is there something that we lose in the process?