The Importance of Flexibility to be Happy in Life

Be Flexible to be Happy:

Many times we feel frustrated. We perceive that sensation on the surface but we fail to realize what is behind this state of unhappiness, annoyance and uncomforting. Here, we can become anchored for years in discomfort, resisting the will of life, angry with ourselves or resentful of others because we hold the rigid belief that things should be different, people should change and we should have done so and so on…

We have been thinking, how much valuable time of life do we lose by going back in time and reproaching ourselves for what could not be?

How much energy do we waste insisting on twisting what is or straightening what is not?

How much do we erode loving ourselves by reproaching or judging ourselves for past mistakes, scolding ourselves for what we could not do differently or did not realize at that time…?

What characteristic hides behind this unnecessary suffering that keeps us at enmity with our life?

Without a doubt, it is the lack of flexibility. Yes… rigidity and resistance to what it is, leave us exhausted, angry, detained and resentful. And this last word is very appropriate to represent the stagnation in which we remain stranded looking at the past, “re-feeling” over and over again what was left undigested and unable to be accepted. It takes us too long to realize that this attitude does not take us anywhere other than where we are and about which we constantly complain. Tirelessly and without respite we spent the same mental tango entitled “I would have liked….”

Immersed in a melancholic and hopeless emotional atmosphere, we convince ourselves that what was not at the time could not be: that if things did not turn out as we had planned, everything is in vain.

We remain as children demanding from Life “a blank page” to start over and trace the different lines… We wait, we wait and the block of clean sheets that we yearn for is not sold anywhere… Life passes us and we continue infatuated with how we wished things had been. We whisper to each other:

I would have liked to start a family…

I would have liked to finish college…

He wanted to encourage me to take that difficult step…

We would have liked to have children or not to have them…

I would have liked to travel…

I would have liked… infinite things more!

In short, rigid people instead of disposing themselves of body and soul to do something valuable with their lives today, childishly yearn to be born again to do differently. And without realizing it they waste possibilities that are not seen because they keep looking back at that love that could not be, at that possibility that could not be realized. They are left hurting for years the idealized what was not possible, instead of doing the possible with what is or can get to do.

In this state of absolute rigidity, we cannot see other options or create new possibilities. With a shock, we discard them because we tell ourselves over and over again that nothing compares with that imagined photo.

Without realizing it, we allow ourselves to fall into the very human tendency to always want and yearn for what we lack. As Nano Serrat says in his melody Lucía…

There is nothing more beautiful than what I have never had or anything more loved than what I have lost… Prisoners of this deception, we tell ourselves the story that just what we do not have would have been the panacea of happiness, the “eureka” of personal fulfillment. In reality, that rigidity makes us addicted to what we lack and blind to what is worth being grateful for. We cheat each time we fall into the fruitless vice of longing for longing. Mesmerized by an ideal that was not, we sink into a kind of mental masturbation and imagine over and over again what the reel of our lives would have been like if we had switched channels.

The more dissatisfaction we feel with our current life when comparing it with the mental sketch that we had as an ideal, the more inflexibility is hidden in our way of thinking and appreciating reality.

Cheer up!! A life of fulfillment does not have a right path and a wrong path. If one of the paths is truncated, the smart thing and the most sensible thing to do is to build alternative paths that bring us closer to a state of well-being that can be reached in different ways, as much as our mental flexibility allows us!

Re-calculating:

It seems that Google Maps is smarter than us to navigate life. Those who know this application will know that there is a suggested and traced a path in the first instance when we indicate that we want to go from here to there. When we pass by or miss the step, it does not stop working or begin to claim us. With flexibility worthy of admiration, it does not take too long to “re-calculate”, re-position ourselves and propose not just one but several alternative routes to reach the same destination.

As Tibetan Buddhism tells us, we all long to be happy and no one wants to suffer. Happiness is not tied to reaching a certain specific goal of success. Happiness is more like a state of internal peace that we can experience if we go through life unfolding our consciousness before each experience that we have to live.

Learning to let flow without resisting what is manifested saves us much of the unnecessary suffering that we generate when we become attached to a lack of love, a disappointment, a deception or something that we feel as a failure. When we impose ourselves before Life with pride and rigidity, life itself is in charge of showing us that much of what we demand is not in our hands. Embracing our circumstances whatever they may be and doing the best we can with them is honoring the life that beats each one of us. From the acceptance of what is, it is possible to improve and beautify what is in our reach.

Resisting and getting angry is wasting the valuable energy that we could be used to improve, in something that hurts us and keeps us paralyzed in the past. The recipe to get out of the swamp of this unnecessary suffering is to tell your mind to be flexible, flexible, and flexible. Our life today is different from the way we think, does not mean that it is worse or that we cannot feel happy.

Ultimately, what hurts us the most is the comparison between the ideal and the real, between what could have been and what is… In reality, if we stop to reflect on our circumstances, most of the time they are not so bad when we evaluate them objectively. For example, we may lack the life as a couple that we had dreamed of but we have more time to dedicate to ourselves, we have good friends, a good job, a healthy body and a place to return to when we feel tired.

We all have what we cannot lack, we count on ourselves… to give us a loving and compassionate treatment that is the truly inexhaustible source of happiness. The prosperity that we look for is nowhere outside of us, it is in the attitude that we assume on a daily basis. This is what, in the end, makes us more or less fortunate.

When we look up and let go of the rigidity; we are very close to that happiness that seems so far away when we allow ourselves to be swallowed by the stubbornness of our ego attached to the past.

It is essential that you learn to distrust the conclusions you reach when you are in a state of sadness. Not everything in your life can be so bad and much of what you want to be different is within your reach if you are willing to relax.

It is no longer possible to go back in time and finish your degree on time, but you can have your degree if instead of complaining and justifying yourself, you put in your best efforts. Perhaps you can no longer go back to that couple that you cry when you remember them. However, that does not mean that you cannot fall in love with yourself again if you open your heart and look beyond your great disappointment. We must always bear in mind that something good carried out is better than something perfect never carried out.

We resist every time we insist, we wear out every time we push; we burn out every time we get angry. On the other hand, when we learn to flow with the evolution of our existence, we enjoy lightness and agility to be flexible and adapt to our life situation in the most fertile and fruitful way. From that state of non-resistance to what is, we can massage what is not going well so that it stops hurting and beautify our life by giving the best lines and the most conscious brushstrokes.

In order to open it is necessary to close. To be able to take it is necessary to let go. To be able to live and feel happiness is a priority above all else, to be able to be flexible.

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