About the truly important differences

Hi everyone!

Well, explaining this briefly. This is the first publication of a series of posts named About the truly important differences. I am going to talk about my experience on this kind of duality and how stoicism helps you to turn a bad point of view into a good one.

Certainly:

“There is a very big difference between to deny a reality and to face it positively”

This is going to be the first phrase of this post. I really hope that you, just like me, reflect about it.

The ethic of stoicism says that the only thing you can change of situations you cannot control is the way in how you react about them. All the things that are happening around you are just following their natural order. Since the beginning of universe, all the events, the big ones and the small ones, are attached one to another. Maybe, one of them has a higher influence but the point is that things are affected among themselves.

You are just a small piece inside this big playboard. Everybody is playing their tokens at the same time and it is at the end of the day when you realize how the match has finished. You have the same possibility 50/50 of winning or losing the round but you have a 100% of responsibility on overcoming to any of the results.

Yes, winning gives us a lot of satisfaction, but losing gives us a lot of experience.

The last depends exclusively of ourselves. I am going to focus only on it because it is the hardest one.

The great Albert Einstein said once:

“ In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity ” and “Once you stop learning, you start dying”
These two quotes are the center of this topic.

First of all, the feeling of losing could completely be translated as a difficult situation, just as Einstein referred. We feel sad, depressed and most of the time stack. We start criticizing and questioning ourselves in a very bad way. Basically, it is not enough that things around are trying to destroy us from the outside, we start destroying us from de inside.

If we could be able of stop just by five minutes and look around we would see the thousands of possibilities that we have.

Let me try to use this example: An architect was building a five-floor building. When he was on the fourth floor, he realized that the inclination of the floor was not uniform. The left side was higher than the right side.

Now let’s analyzing which were the possibilities he had. The first one: To continue and finishing the building on that way. Anyway, he was missing a single floor to finish. But he was assuming the risk that the building would fall.

On the other hand, there was the possibility of destroying the building and starting it again. It would take a longer time to be finished but he could be pretty sure that the building would stay stand a longer time, maybe forever. Who knows…

What do you think he did?

Well, he demolished the building. It was the gift for his son who was getting married and he could not assume the risk that he and his future family would die inside it.

He cleaned the ground of debris and tried to discovered which were the mistakes. He found that the ground was giving way under his feet. That land was not adequate for any kind of building and, in the future, it was going to fall anyway.

It was the first time that something like that happened to him in his 20 years being an architect.

Finally, he found a new ground and built a new building. He finished satisfactorily and his son could live there with his family.

Five years later he passed in front of the old ground. And imagine this, there was no land. Everything had disappeared.

Actually, he is an extremely careful person. He only starts building when he makes sure everything is all right. He learned that when things start right they have all the chances of finish right.

Now, we are going to correlate this example with the rest of the post

The man had two choices. To deny the floor was not uniform or to face it like a reality. To deny it would have had worst consequences, as you noticed.

Instead, he decided to start again. Despite he had 20 years being an architect he continued learning.

Every time you feel in difficult situation remember:

Most of the time, difficulties try to make us stronger
When things around are trying to destroy you, train your spirit to become stronger
Things are just happening, they are not going to stop just because of us.

If you have to begin again, begin
If you have to change, change
The only thing you can do in difficulties is to learn, so learn.

Just as my grandma used to tell me:

“You will overcome this too, darling”

Thank you for reading this