4 life lessons that we should learn to live better

We are born without a manual, but with an innate condition to modify behavior as we gain experience. But there comes a time, when we reach maturity, when we lose that freshness and, just as the body tends to become more rigid over time, so does the mind.

In this way, we preserve what we are, what we have achieved, and we become conservative. However, life keeps changing around and the challenges don’t stop. If we do not keep our options and capacities open, the risk is alienation: feeling outside of the world and of oneself.

The journalist and editor Paco Valero, who directed the magazine Comprehensive for 10 years, reflects on it in this article and offers us 4 lessons that can help us all to live better:

“We need to continue learning from life, as we need to exercise the body over the years, to grow as free, responsible and capable beings. You just have to dust off qualities that we all have, but that we often forget in the attic of life”, says Paco Valero. Those qualities that we all have are:

Modesty. Life can always surprise you and you must be open to surprise no matter how much you think you have already seen and experienced everything. You just have to be vigilant and keep your eyes peeled.Curiosity. Getting to know other cultures, other ways of living, other people, can help to relativize our life options.Delivery. A new path that opens up is an opportunity to experience sensations and emotions that can enrich us; the reward is usually higher the higher the delivery.Let go. It is good to maintain some control of life, but sometimes you have to let go, ready to accept what events sow.Fruition. How easily we forget how much we enjoyed learning something new when we were young! Keeping that illusion alive is the best guarantee of a happy life

“There is no instruction book to manage ourselves in life,” Valero clarifies. “However, we often make mistakes by not putting aside essential lessons to have a full life.”

These are toSome of the life lessons that can help us walk in the right direction according to the one who was director of Comprehensive:

1. Making mistakes is a way of learning

But make mistakes, be wrong and Being wrong again, like getting it right, is part of the learning process of life. They are experiences that you are acquiring and; together with others from which you obtain knowledge, they become authentic life lessons.

They are certainly not as clear as a manual that can be followed step by step.but it is that life is not that channeled river that some imagine. It can always surprise us. The strange thing, in fact, is that it doesn’t.

The first lesson that I always keep in mind is that who i am right now is not who i thought i would be when i was young. Not worse or better, different.

Life is change, although sometimes, when we look back, we have the perception that nothing has changed. I think so.

The atoms that shape our being change, the molecules that originate or participate in the chemical processes of our body; our muscles and bones change and change our way of smiling or loving.

And of course, our opinions and our way of seeing life change.. How can they not! Yeah. were it not so, it would be as if life had nothing to do with us, as if we were impervious to it.

We change because it is the way to stay alive, attentive. That’s why When someone says to me, “How much you’ve changed!” I take it as a compliment. And what I will change.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize myself at any time in the past: there are always recognizable traits, it’s just that, paradoxically, We are the same based on change.

2. It is important to live day by day

While you are young, passions drive you and great ideals guide you. Physical fullness makes you ignore your own body and take it for granted that it will always be that way.

You are like a ship sailing with full sails on a windswept sea. You are hitting jumps and lurches. You ignore concrete things, concrete sensations, concrete feelings.

In youth one tends to see the outside world through the vague, the unformulated, the unreal. But life is doing its job, in a slow settling process with which you are acquiring the sense of reality and its rewards.

What you eat, the air you breathe, the nature that inspires you, the person you love, the feelings that overwhelm you… you stop perceiving them through the stereotype, the convention, and you give them your meaning, your label. Every moment gains its importance.

Youth is wonderful, yes. But I have appreciated maturity more, when each river has had its name, each city its memory, each friend its reward…

When you are young you do not stop asking yourself who am I?, looking in you for some essences that you are supposed to have. But that question is difficult to answer, because what does it mean to know each other? See you as you are, without a doubt; don’t cheat, too.

But heThe capacity for self-deception that human beings have is very great, surely superior to the ability to observe oneself as it is. And more when only concepts, ideas, many of them vaporous, are handled.

With age you discover that there is something better to know who you really are: your days. What you do, what you live, is what best explains you and what can become the lever of change when you need it.

In this sense, I always remember what the grandmother of the primatologist Jane Goodall repeated to her, as she recounts in her memoirs, when she was a child: “Your strength are your days. As your days are, your life will be”. It is good advice that I have tried to follow when life has taken me down paths that were bewildering or beyond me.

On those occasions, I have fled from the big questions and the big goals and I have clung to my concrete days, trying to improve them one by one, creating my new strength, looking for new satisfactions. Because it’s about living, and we live day by daynot to pretend that you do.

3. Judge less, understand more, get fully involved

Life teaches you another lesson with age: how easy it is to fall into the temptation of judging or in the temptation of indifference! You scale from one to the other as if there were no choice. But there is, of course.

As replace people’s judgment with something more human such as understanding. I like to understand people, the motivations that guide their lives and what makes them happy or unhappy, and I try not to get carried away by curiosity or the desire to judge whether what they do is correct or not.

I want to know, because people interest me, but I don’t want to become an arbiter of their morals, beliefs or affinities. After all, it is what I would like others to do with me.

We’re all making choices and behind each one there is usually no clear, clear process that can be explained in a few words. They are the result of a thousand circumstances. However, the judgments are blunt, cold, sharp.

That’s why I prefer to understand, as I prefer meddle in what surrounds me. That is an attribute of adolescence that I have kept.

I am interested in what is happening near and far, and as far as possible I try to contribute my grain of sand to improve it, even though our lives seem smaller and less transcendent when compared to the great challenges of the world.

The easy answer is to say: Why bother if everything is going to continue the same!

But, as the philosopher Fernando Savater said, What differentiates one from the other is that some take the trouble and others don’t.. Some bother to do what they do well and others cheat with reality as best they can.

sometimes take the trouble It is uncomfortable, because there is usually a price to pay, but it always rewards: with each decision you are giving meaning to your life, the meaning that you want to give it.

4. We can learn to be happy

The risk, very evident, is to believe yourself omnipotent; think that everything depends on you; something very far from reality, because all lives are intertwined. But If all of life is a story that we tell ourselves, I want to participate in the plot and its development.

I don’t want them to give me everything done. in the end, dand what it is about, is to be happyor in a less important way, live many joyful, blissful moments.

Over time, the sources of satisfaction change and you learn some things, like that unhappiness seems to some people a fate, a fatality.

Goethe said that one of the surest ways to be unhappy is to get carried away by the endless search, having a personality that does not find satisfaction in any position, in any accommodation; for which nothing seems sufficient or adequate.

These men waste life and deprive it of all pleasure. Because instead of applying to the talents they have, concrete and realand get the most out of them, they get lost in mental labyrinths that lack sustenance, base, are a source of dissatisfaction.

Happiness, you learn over time, has something intangible, elusive. You can be possessed by it and only realize it later, when it is already a mere memory, pleasant melancholy.

The nature of happiness seems as random as it is elusive, more the daughter of chance than of will.

Sometimes happiness disappears almost at the moment it arises, other times it accompanies us for a few days, even a few months. But in the end, fades like a ghost. And the most amazing thing of all is that if we made an effort to promote the events that generated itwe would see that they are rarely successful again.

Perhaps, as the philosopher Pascal Bruckner has said, what we call happiness today is the same as what the ancients, the classics, called “grace”, a gift that depended above all on the will of the godsof his whim or of his favor.

But we are no longer for gods: they have long since disappeared from our horizon, although their message remains: somehow, they tell us, you have to deserve it to get it. It does not admit cheats. You have to work it.

In order to be happy, as Candide and Pangloss conclude in Voltaire’s work, after experiencing a thousand unfortunate incidents and being unable to find meaning in them, “il faut cultiver notre jardin”. Yes, we have to cultivate our garden.

Day by day, building friendships, taking care of the people we love, doing the job well and trying to find satisfaction in it. It’s another life lesson.

Books to know more

Conversations with Goethe; JP Eckerman. Ed. Cliffthe fish concert; Halldor Laxness. Ed TurnerThe evolutionary self; M. Csikszentmihalyi. Ed. Kairos