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Unexpected Encounter
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She had watched him from the same hammock and in the same position in which I found her prostrated by the last lights of old age when I returned to this forgotten village, trying to put the broken mirror of memory back together from so many scattered shards.
Gabriel García Márquez, “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”
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Grit
Angela Lee Duckworth, an American psychologist, defines grit as “passion and perseverance for very long-term goals”. She says: “Grit is having stamina. [...] Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint”. No one could have said it better. Her psychological and demographic studies are an accurate proof of what actually determines success: finding one’s passion and seeking perseverance in order to achieve it. With the ultimate objective of doing so, one must first search for his/her passion. Subsequently, one must persevere to accomplish that goal. Finally and most importantly, one has to undertake the arduous task of maintaining his/her ambitions and embark upon further, more challenging endeavors.
Discovering one’s passion is utterly complicated. As humans, we are sometimes able to understand components of our complex life and know that the decisions we make define who we are. Getting to know oneself can be an extremely complicated stump one may encounter in the process of achieving so, which is why discovering a passion is a real challenge. The key to finding one’s passions, however, lies in what each one of us wishes to change in the world. We need to understand the importance of establishing a goal, a passion that will lead us to a change in our future, and consequently a change in the world.
Just like Duckworth carried out, the virtue of perseverance is necessary both in the professional field and in the personal spectrum. It is an essential pillar in maintaining friendships, successful marriage and in many cases; it contributes positively to one’s relationship with God. Having said that, it is important to emphasize the importance of not only being guided by will and pleasure (hedonism), but equally by duty and capability and by rational thinking (pragmatism). Life is not only confined as the series of events that take place, but also as a compilation of hopes and ambitions that we desire and want to happen to us, and here lies the necessity of this virtue or, as Arturo Graf described, "Perseverance is the virtue by which all other virtues bear fruit".
Additionally, there exists a correlation between perseverance and happiness: success. Life is empty when certain goals are not set; goals that are affordable, gradual and coherent, those that allow us to build our approach of completing our project of life. To achieve such goals, one must possess mindfulness and strive to do things well, without ever forgetting a key ingredient so that the virtue of persistence does not become a vice: humility.
By the same token, the importance of the notion of prioritizing should not be overlooked. Once priorities are identified, one will be able to determine where the most of time input should be placed. It is vital to know how to do so; however, realizing so is a matter of proportionality. But in general, we must learn how to give importance to ambitions and how to be able to value the risk of seeking them. The determinants of what’s important and what’s not differ from community to community. For instance, many communities in East and West Asia and Africa consider establishing a family one of the most important achievements that should be sought. Likewise, higher education is a universal objective that many work hard to obtain. Besides a collective approach, it is clear that individuals within one community do have different determinants, which is the key point: each one of us is able to choose which way to take, which scenario to live but also value which path will reward him or her with the better.
It is undoubtedly significant to understand one fact about life: it brings a lot of failure, which is the only reason why we need to be persevering. Learn how to set your objectives and learn how to seek them sooner and not later. When you’re at your lowest point, learn how to persist, and then persist.
“Fall forward. Sometimes it’s the best way to figure out where you’re going”
Denzel Washington’s commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania, 2011
This is a Team Essay written by Fakhr Rahimah, Belén González, Lucía Lavalle, and myself.
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Mistakes
Part of being human is making mistakes. Part of being human is learning from them. Both are unavoidable and are always correlated with one another and, if both of them are part of being human, I can proudly say I am very, very human.
My earliest childhood memory is calling my preschool teacher “fat” when I was five and, as a result, getting kicked out of the class for a whole day. My earliest life memory is a mistake, but I learned from it.
Since then, I have made many more mistakes, most of them small, but never insignificant. I have hurt and been hurt. I have forgiven and been forgiven. But I have never forgotten, as it would be counterproductive to do so, because the best thing about making mistakes is learning from them, and if we forget the mistake, we surely haven’t taken advantage of it.
When he was about to die, Jesus said: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). Following his example, on December 27, 1983, Pope John Paul II visited and forgave Mehmet Ali Ağca, who shot him in St. Peter’s Square on a murder attempt. We also see forgiveness in 1990: Nelson Mandela, recently released after twenty years in a South African prison, says: “We especially need to forgive each other, because (…) when you forgive you heal completely”.
Being forgiven is nothing more than a learning experience in which forgetting would be completely useless. We make mistakes all the time, and we learn from them. If we forget the mistake, we forget learning about it.
And that is precisely why forgiving never means forgetting. Forgiveness is something personal that doesn’t lay beyond he or she that has been hurt; a person who, despite the harm, knows that those destructive emotions within won’t go away until he or she has completely forgiven.
Forgiveness is all about us; it is something we do for ourselves, not for the others. It is about getting rid of resentfulness, repulsion and hatred. It is about acknowledging apologies and accepting human errors. Forgiveness, in the end, just means making peace with the pain.
I think that’s why everyone always says “do not be afraid to make mistakes”. I think I know why they say that. It is because you learn from mistakes. It is because you learn from yourself, and from the forgiveness of others. They say that because, once you have been forgiven, it just makes sense to forgive.
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We rushed up; he said he could only take one; without a word Eddie jumped in and slowly rattled from my sight, and wearing my wool plaid shirt. Well, alackaday, I kissed the shirt goodbye; it had only sentimental value in any case.
Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”
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Leaders
It’s simple to say: we need women leaders, not because our only objective is to achieve absolute equality, but because women are just as capable as men to hold important positions in which leadership is necessary. It’s simple. Simple to say. To achieve, not so much. Or not at all. First, because we are living in a world that heavily underestimates women. Second, because those who say we aren’t living in that kind of world are precisely the ones that undervalue them the most.
Women have gone through an astounding process of empowerment for decades now. In the Western world, their education is as good as men’s, and their university grades are higher than ever (higher, in fact, than men’s). Furthermore, in the field of education, we could say that we have almost achieved some sort of equality. This is the kind of equality we want to achieve in all other aspects: a system based on meritocracy, in which any person is capable of assuming an important role based on his or her merits and virtues, despite any of his or her physical and sociological features.
That’s why it is hard to hear someone say “I’m not a feminist”. One of the reasons might be that he or she does not understand what the definition of feminism is, which can easily be fixed. Feminism is “the advocacy of women's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes” (Oxford Dictionary), “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” (Merriam-Webster), “the belief that women should be allowed the same rights, power, and opportunities as men and be treated in the same way, or the set of activities intended to achieve this state” (Cambridge Dictionary).
Why is it called feminism, then? Why not just sex equality? Because it is necessary to first empower women in order to change the perspective with which the world views them in order to achieve full equality. And again, we are not talking about splitting up the tasks 50% to each sex but, nowadays, the proportion should be very close to that figure, especially in fields such as politics and services, in which the different female and male traits should not matter at all. Reality is much different.
Practically half of the population is female. However, just 5% of executives in Fortune 500 companies are women. We, as a society, have assumed that maleness is a trait positively correlated with being a leader, and we couldn’t be more wrong. We are evolving quickly, nevertheless, and we will be one of the last generations in which the sex gap is so disturbingly huge.
We need more female leaders because leadership is not defined by sex and, if we had real equality, there would already be many more of them. We need to empower women, break the glass ceiling, in order to change society’s conception of them. We need to modify women’s conception of themselves so that they are no longer underestimated, but rather valued for their merits, and never again judged by their gender.
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