Living above the Arctic Circle, in a beautiful city called Tromsø in Northern Norway, has given me more than fascinating landscapes and unique experiences. It has taught me something I carry with me every day: darkness is temporary, and light always finds its way back. But more than that — the darkness will persist as long as we fail to find our own light. And there is no brighter light than the one we carry within ourselves.
Let me explain what I mean.
In Tromsø, you experience what is called the Polar Nights. Beginning on November 21st and lasting until January 21st, the sun remains below the horizon for two full months. During this time, there are only 3 to 4 hours of twilight each day — a beautiful, bluish half-light — and then full darkness again. If you have never experienced it, it is hard to imagine. No sun. No bright mornings. Only long stretches of darkness.
During this period, your body and mind begin to feel the weight of it. You lack Vitamin D, you feel tired, your sense of time and space blurs. You can become irritable, heavy, slow. And you find yourself with essentially two choices: you can either let the darkness take over — the sadness, the frustration, the low energy — or slowly begin to look for your own light within it.
This doesn’t mean pretending the darkness isn’t there. It means knowing that even inside it, you still have some say in how you move through it.
“The real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darkness.” – Nikos Kazantzakis
Here in Tromsø during the Polar Nights, you learn to look differently. You notice the Northern Lights — that extraordinary green shimmer across the dark sky. You see the stars and the moon more clearly than you ever do in summer. You take your vitamins, you find small rituals that help, you discover beauty in places you wouldn’t have thought to look. The darkness teaches you things the light never could.
And I’ve come to understand that these Polar Nights don’t only happen in the Arctic. They happen in life too — periods where everything feels dark, where sadness or loss or confusion settles in and the sun seems very far away. These seasons are part of the cycle. They come for everyone, in different forms and at different times.
“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” – Desmond Tutu
The key isn’t to control how you feel — feelings don’t work that way, and pretending they do only adds shame to the darkness. The key is to remember that your current circumstances are not the whole story. That this period, however heavy, is not permanent. And that you carry within you something that the darkness cannot touch — a capacity for light that is entirely your own.
One day the sun will rise again. It always does. But in the meantime — you shine.
Not because you have to perform happiness, not because you’re pretending everything is fine. But because your light — your true self, your values, your love, your resilience — is real, and it matters, and it doesn’t require perfect conditions to exist.
So if you ever find yourself in a period of darkness, remember this:
The absence of sunlight is not the absence of life. Sometimes finding light in the darkness does not mean making the darkness disappear. Sometimes it simply means learning how to live through it without losing yourself.
If the sun does not shine, you shine. And when it does return, you shine brighter — because now you know that the light was yours all along.