To Fly High, Life Frees Us Of Some Baggage

To fly high and achieve true happiness, life will separate us from some excess baggage. This liberation is not traumatic, but constant, and we must be able to accept it so as not to hinder our personal growth, the opportunity to be free and authentic.

The social psychologist  Robert Levine carried out a very interesting experiment, which aimed to analyze the hypothetical relationship between the rhythm of life and personal complexity with happiness. The study was carried out at various companies around the world, and four concrete variables were used for this.

The first was the speed at which people walked during rush hour; the second the number of times they looked at the clock; the third the number of personal contacts present in the directories of their phones; the fourth, and last, the way these people relaxed when they had free time.

The results were amazing: the greater personal complexity corresponded to greater unhappiness. According to Dr. Robert Levine, people living in modern societies move too fast, are obsessed with time and accumulate things and people as if they put things in a closet,  thinking that in this way they will achieve better status and well-being established by the norms. .

Nothing more wrong. To fly high, you need to simplify and, above all, get rid of various weights. We propose that you reflect on this.   

If you want to grow, you have to learn to fly

Growing up is a natural process, we all do it. However, adding stages to our life cycle often leads us to interpret reality in the wrong way. When we are young, the family, the school and the environment we attend inculcate in us the idea that growing up is synonymous with earning things: independence, freedom, experiences, relationships, material goods …  

We idealize maturity, as they have sold us the idea that “when we grow up, we will have the world at our feet”. Perhaps for this reason  as we grow up we begin to feel a feeling of disillusionment, because those promises do not come true,  because happiness is not a law and because there are no psychological or economic rewards for the simple fact of fulfilling the years.

We understand that life is hard and then we broaden our personal filters and let everything that comes remain and thus find a substitute for happiness. Having lots of friends, even if not all of us like it, is almost necessary and sometimes it distracts us. Having a partner is mandatory, because there is nothing more terrible than loneliness.

That’s not good, changes need to be made. We have to reprogram the GPS of our lives and orient it in one direction: upwards. We fly high, very high, let us free ourselves from conventionality, from people who do not bring us anything, from the routines that turn off our creativity, from the spaces and dynamics that clip the wings of our personal growth and our essence, from the classic childhood idea which leads us to think that the more things we have, the happier we will be.

It is not the right way to live. As Robert Levine explains to us,  life does not mean accumulating items in a closet or contacts in your phone book.  To live is to fly and to do so you need to slow down and get rid of some of your equipment.

4 steps to learn to fly

If there was anyone who didn’t want to grow up, it was Peter Pan. It is curious how James Matthew Barrie was able to trace and place various dimensions in this classic character that, in a certain way, are parallel to those innate wings with which children come into the world.

In one part of the book, Peter Pan and the lost children state that I don’t want to grow up “ because they don’t want to go to school, they don’t want to repeat like parrots and learn stupid rules”. School, our education and society itself are decisive scenarios that, throughout history, have held back our spontaneity, our ability to be creative, free and different from each other.

To learn to fly, we need to recover part of that perspective with which we looked at the world when we were little. The one in which everything was possible and in which happiness was in places so close to us that it touched us, or invaded us. In turn, to succeed, we will have to act as wise and courageous adults and know how to use the right strategies.

They are the following:

Learn to simplify to fly high

We need to learn to simplify, slow down and prioritize to regain control of our lives. For this reason, there is nothing better than reflecting on these simple concepts:

• Situations and people:  the first thing we will do is to sincerely and objectively evaluate everything we interact with every day. Evaluate from 1 to 10 the degree of satisfaction that these situations and people with whom you relate on a continuous basis bring you.

• Time:  we all have days of the same length. Well, of those 24 hours, how many of these would you classify as “quality time”? And what could you do to have more hours of authentic quality?

• Priority: To fly high, you don’t need to free yourself from everything and everyone. It is necessary to prioritize and be clear about what is fundamental in our lives, and what is best to leave behind.

• Put it into practice. The last point, not least, consists in acting and opening the doors of our closet to carry out adequate cleaning. It is not an act of selfishness, and you must not feel guilty about it or allow others to do so. It is an act of mental and emotional health that not everyone has the courage to put into practice, because remember, only brave people, children and free people know that to be happy, nothing has more value than flying high and light.