Spoiler alert: Inside Out is as good as everyone says it is. It’s lovely and funny and moving – I was crying with laughter at the rainbow unicorn dream sequence, and properly crying at the end – and it’s also very, very smart. Not least because, at its heart, it has a wise lesson that’s just as important for grown-ups as it is for children.

And that lesson is: allow yourself to feel sadness. Or to put it another way: if you want the rainbow unicorn, you gotta put up with the rain.

Because Pixar knows a thing or two about screenwriting, the moment this lesson is first imparted to the audience is the moment that Joy, our hero inside 11-year-old Riley’s brain, starts to learn it, too. Bing Bong, Riley’s imaginary friend, is inconsolable because the rocket he and Riley created has been destroyed, along with other inventions of her childhood mind. While Joy tries to fix the situation using her typically breezy, optimistic approach, Sadness simply goes to Bing Bong, sits down with him and listens as he talks between sobs. “I understand,” she says quietly. “They took something that you loved. That’s sad.”

Within moments, Bing Bong has dried his eyes and is ready to move on with their quest. Equal parts baffled and impressed, Joy asks Sadness: “How did you do that?”

Sadness did it, of course, by acknowledging Bing Bong’s sadness and allowing him to feel it. And while that may sound very simple, it’s amazing how little we do it in life – not just with others, but also with ourselves.

The pressures on us to not show sadness, fear and other emotions we deem to be ‘negative’ – pressures that can come from society, our family, our workplace – are partly the cause. And they can start at a young age. In Inside Out, Riley is praised by her mother for being “our happy girl” through their house move – but underneath, Riley isn’t completely happy at all, being sad, worried and afraid about this big change. What’s doubly poignant about this scene is that not only is Riley not being fully understood, but she’s also implicitly being told that she must continue to be happy – or at least appear to be – in order for her parents, for the family unit, to be happy too.

Asking for a 24/7 ‘happy face’ is a lot to put on anyone, adult or child, and what’s more, suppressing these feelings just causes further suffering. Our emotions leak out in other ways – in our behaviour, in our treatment of ourselves and others – and not only does the feeling not go anywhere, suppressing it makes it harder for it to go anywhere.

Instead, by allowing ourselves to sit in our sadness, we give ourselves a better chance to move through it. No sooner is Bing Bong allowed to feel sad and cry than he picks himself up, dusts himself down and starts all over again. It’s something we see children do every day: they get upset, they cry, then they’re up and running and laughing again.

Even animals do it. As Eckhart Tolle points out in The Power Of Now, when ducks get in a fight, it never lasts long: they just separate, flap their wings to release the surplus energy, and move on. (Try looking out for this next time you see some ducks – although I’m not advocating deliberately starting a fight between them. “Leave him, Jemima! He’s not worth it!”)

We adults can learn from ducks and kids and Bing Bong. Sadly, though, instead of stamping our feet, crying our heart out or flapping our wings, most of us suppress uncomfortable feelings when they come. What’s more, we also go to great lengths to try to keep our lives as fear-free and pain-free as possible, and loathe discomfort or unhappiness when they strike.

But they will strike –­­­ as sure as (duck) eggs is eggs. In fact, what Sadness is doing in that key scene isn’t just recognising Bing Bong’s sadness but also acknowledging that life is intrinsically sad at times. As the film concludes, this essential combination of Joy and Sadness is a recognition of how life really is: both happy and sad. Because no matter how much we try to control things, it’s impossible to avoid painful moments in our lives (and I say this as a person who’s an even bigger cock-eyed optimist than Joy). It’s how we then handle this pain, how we learn to move through it, that’s important. Or as the Buddhist saying goes: “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.”

So, while this lesson – recognising and accepting sadness – is something that Riley’s parents learn to do with their daughter at the end of Inside Out, it’s also something that we grown-ups can benefit from applying to ourselves, too.

We can try to accept life as it is, with its ups and downs, its Joy and Sadness. And we can allow ourselves, and others, to feel pain or sadness when it does come: to sit with what feels uncomfortable and not immediately try to run away from it, deny it or dull it. To be mindful and rest in the moment, even if that moment is bad, and recognise how things actually are, rather than how we’d like them to be. And to trust that in doing this, we will naturally, at the right pace, move through it.

So, the next time you’re feeling sad, why not give yourself permission to sit with that feeling. And if anybody asks you what you’re doing, just tell them you’re letting your Sadness sit with your Bing Bong. And if they look at you strangely when you say that, tell them to see Inside Out.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been exactly a year since the lovely, brilliant Rik Mayall left us. His death – and the fact that it’s already been a year since it happened – is, for me, a reminder of both how quickly time passes and how important it is to live our life fully while we’re here (and of course those two things are connected). And if there was someone who lived his life fully – someone who was totally and utterly himself while he was on this planet – it was Rik Mayall.

His speech to the students of Reading University in 2008 – in which he gave his five mantras for leading a happy life – was testament to that:

Rik was my childhood (and adulthood) comedy hero. Here’s what I wrote when he passed away:

People Say You Should Never Meet Your Heroes. Those People Never Met Rik Mayall

As a kid growing up in a nice middle class house in nice middle England – literally, it was the West Midlands – in the 1980s, my parents weren’t fond of us watching ‘rubbish’ on television. ‘Rubbish’ largely covered a) anything that was obviously loads of silly fun, b) anything showing on ITV and c) anything American. Shows like The A-Team and Knight Rider were, therefore, triple threats; and we were a house that chose Multi-Coloured Swap Shop over Tiswas every Saturday morning. Because while Noel Edmonds and Posh Paws were clearly loads of silly fun, Tiswas was even sillier. (And possibly more fun. I don’t know. I wasn’t allowed to watch it.)

So I’m sure it’s only because it was on the BBC that we were allowed to watch The Young Ones.

And when we did, we didn’t know what had hit us.

Throughout its two series, we talked about it with our friends in the playground, and my sister and I did endless Rick (or rather: “Rrrrrick”) impressions. I even sat in front of the TV with my cassette recorder, taping the show so I could listen back to the audio of it in my bedroom. The brilliant, silly-but-smart slapstick comedy of The Young Ones made me laugh in my belly. But most of all: Rik Mayall did.

I had already known and liked Rik as the character Kevin Turvey (in fact, that’s when my and my sister’s impressions of him started) but with The Young Ones, it developed into full-blown love.

I wrote him a fan letter during The Young Ones reign – I was only 12 – and he wrote a short letter back, including a signed photo (which I of course proudly took to show my friends at school). Being unaware of the phrase ‘quit while you’re ahead’ – I was only 12 – I wrote to him again. And again he wrote back, this time including a flyer for his forthcoming play: The Government Inspector. I didn’t go and see it – I was only 12 – but years later I saw Michael Sheen in a production of it at The Old Vic. His performance was, essentially, one big Rik Mayall impression.

The ’80s continued, and while I’m sure Michael Sheen dropped his Rik impressions, my sister and I didn’t: fuelled as we were by The Dangerous Brothers, Filthy Rich & Catflap and of course Mayall’s cameos in Blackadder – not just as Lord Flashheart (“Woof!”) but also Mad Gerald (“Mr Rat!”).

And then, in the ’90s, I met him.

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