It is ok to be human!

I was about 15 years old when I was studying high school, I remember it was a summer day, then our philosophy teacher asked us "Boys, what is the biggest fear you face now?" many of my classmates responded, fear of heights, of insects, however, I responded "fear of failure", at that time I was a student of good grades, I had always been someone who had tried hard to get the best results, to which My teacher told me "That is inevitable and you must get used to it", at that time I did not understand what he meant.

Years later while studying at the university, I understood what my teacher had told me at that time, I had never failed an exam before, I remember taking an exam in the subject of Physics, which to my surprise I did not pass when I received my results, The world came to me, I still remember being depressed for weeks, I couldn't believe I hadn't approved.

Nobody prepared me for failure, all my life had been relatively easy for me, that day I learned that you don't always win, you don't always pass an exam. And that's fine, that's what makes us human, having the ability to accept and know that life is a set of positive and negative events.

Today, it seems that we are so used to trying to eliminate all the negative, society sells us the idea that the only feelings we should feel are the positive ones, these include love, euphoria, gratitude, satisfaction, etc., but What happens with the other extreme, what we should do with anger, anger, sadness, melancholy, after all these ways of feeling, is what makes us human too.

Tal Ben-Shahar in his book "Being Happy: You don´t have to be perfect to lead a richer, happier life" tells us that there are two types of people, perfectionists and optimalists, basically the perfectionist believes that a happy life consists of an incessant stream of positive emotions, and as it aspires to be happy, rejects negative or unpleasant emotions. On the contrary, the optimalists accept negative emotions as an inevitable part of existence, accommodates sadness and pain, letting those feelings intensify his life experience.

And it is true that we all want to be happy, or at least we all pretend to be happy, we rarely show our unhappiness abroad, we see every day on our social networks how we are bombarded by posts of our friends with photos of their vacations, of celebrations and everything seems perfect, rarely does anyone show the other side of the coin, and we have been taught to put on masks to pretend our true face, every time you ask someone, how are you? the question by default it is "Good" and what if we are more sincere and we give ourselves permission to say "A little sad" "something worried", that is not bad, when we accept our emotions and give them the value they should have, We are making room for that emotion to be recognized and disappear more quickly.

In “Brave new world”, Aldous Huxley describes the future in which pain is eliminated through a drug called soma, his book is science fiction however it also happens in our reality nowadays. The pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain is something natural In the West, we reject suffering since we perceive it as an impediment to happiness, in other cultures such as Eastern one, it is recognized since they understand that it is the only way to improve as a person, although negative emotions are not something we should look for. It is an inevitable part of our life; it reminds us of our limitations and we must have the humility to accept them.

Respecting reality implies accepting things as they are, our potential, limitations and our humanity, if we recognize that suffering is essential in our life and that it also brings some benefits, such as the cultivation of wisdom and compassion, we will admit it more easily. - Tal Ben Shahar.