Embrace Pain, Thank Resistance

Embrace Pain, Thank Resistance

By: Erreh Svaia

Full Metal Lifehacker

We have an almost irrational fear of negativity "you are very negative", "you have a bad attitude", for years I heard this kind of affirmation towards certain people whose comments were really challenging a status quo, with enough capacity to bring down the plans of anyone and propose better ideas, although perhaps afraid to carry them out, I must say that at the beginning it is difficult to understand this situation, we label certain people as "toxic" and isolate any opportunity to take advantage of their divergent thinking, their possible capacity to see "outside the box" or its ability to establish the so-called "lateral thinking" that Edward De Bono told us about and that has proved so useful in many ideas.

I have encountered this "negative attitude" or "toxicity" on many occasions, but rarely that attitude came from someone who did not have something to contribute, usually who did not even understand a situation, or had an apathetic attitude about it, in silence, some nodded, some complied without questioning and in the end, they executed in a terrible way. Is that to be positive and to have a "good attitude"? We speak here of a "false positivism" or a "negative positivism", if I am allowed such grammatical incongruity, a "positivism" that actually turns out to be sabotage in any project, a Trojan that in the end will turn against us to despite the apparent agreement with our ideas.

Sometimes that "negativity" or "toxicity" adds to our ideas an always necessary critical sense, an opportunity to refine and reinforce our thoughts properly, I cannot imagine life if everyone says yes to my ideas, on the contrary, I find it quite edifying to find myself with that resistance, with that questioning, with that opportunity to find myself with another "vision" of what I am thinking, never a muscle will develop fully without adequate resistance, a sword will never have the perfect edge without the adequate friction, the mind will never reach the supreme development without arduous hours of dedication and study, so how can we hope that our ideas take the correct course if we cannot take advantage of that resistance, of that "negativity" that we can channel to the positive in a process chemical that is useful to us, without being able to assimilate that "toxicity" in our favor, in the exercise of exquisite alchemy?

The great Pema Chodron, a religious Buddhist writer of great books like the classic "When Things Fall Apart" talks about embracing that negativity, which brings us closer to that Buddhist concept in which we understand that suffering is not bad, but is part of the life itself, and helps us to understand reality and live it in the right way, instead of refusing to understand reality and living in a bubble that will drag us lower even if we do not face it directly and immediately, that which we do not accept, we will not be able to understand, and what we do not understand we will not be able to solve, there are things under our control that by accepting them we can solve, while others that escape our influence must also be accepted and let them go, otherwise they become in ballast impossible to solve and that we will drag making impossible our existence, the suffering is not bad, not unfair, is part of life, negativity is not bad, or toxicity, the issue is how we assimilate such situations, I accept the suffering because I want to understand it, I want to be better and at some point overcome it, I accept the toxicity as part of a gradual process of strengthening (do not forget that ancient practice developed by King Mithridates VI, who feared to die poisoned by his many enemies, and thus developed a method by which with the gradual intake of small amounts of poison was able to develop an immunity to these substances, or the snake handlers of Burma, who gradually apply tattoos on their bodies with the venom of several snakes becoming immune to the bites of these reptiles), "What does not kill you makes you stronger" Nietzsche pointed out , Nassim Nicholas Taleb would call this "the anti-fragility", others will speak of scientific processes of adaptation and evolution as or a cockroach (my favorite invulnerable creature) survives an insecticide and develops and transmits to its descendants a gene resistant to that poison, in the same way that the human being develops defenses when being inoculated with a weakened version of a certain disease-causing agent, only embracing and accepting that suffering, we acquire antibodies to overcome it and move forward with our life, only accepting that toxicity, it is how we can get ahead stronger and enriched in our person.