Friday Thoughts by the Fire: #83
The price of doing business
When I was younger my mom used to preach against complaining. She didn’t like that whiny voice I would get and the way I would wail, “It isn’t fair!”
One of her trademarks is that life isn’t fair. Not far behind — I remember how much she despised complaining. She said it never did anything productive.
It is true. When I’ve spent times in life wallowing, feeling sorry for myself, and complaining, I would almost purposefully look for the negative angle. I wanted to complain.
I wanted things to be so unfair sometimes that there wasn’t a possible action I could take to make things better. It was never true of course. But it always seemed true. It always seemed like there was no way out and it just wasn’t up to me.
I was a victim in God’s sandbox, getting chased by fire ants and trying to avoid the rain.
Okay it wasn’t quite that dramatic.
I’ve found that sometimes circumstances get so tiresome that we not only want to complain, but we want permission to complain.
Venting feels good in the moment. I love going on rants. I rant verbally and through text. The recipients of these texts sometimes literally get tired reading all the stuff I write. Attention spans are small these days and I pull no punches on being wordy. Self-awareness counts for something though, right?
I digress.
Recently I’ve come across Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and his seemingly tireless quest to tell us all about the negative long-term effects of complaining too much.
He has many simple but profound strategies to turn complaints and negative thinking into positive reframes. Some of the most practical insights he encourages are about replacing complaints with gratitude.
For people addicted to complaining, this will not be an easy mindset to adapt. But as with all things, practice makes perfect.
I’ve been focused on absorbing more positive reframes lately. If something can improve my mindset, help me become more resilient, and teach me something, I’m usually in.
This is why journaling is such a positive experience. Might as well add homework in the middle of a long-winded discussion on complaining. Take these questions and answer them honestly — What is something that made you happy today? What is something you witnessed that made someone else happy? What did you learn?
I’ve realized that dying to myself is a continuous process. If you are learning, then you’re growing. If you’re growing, then you’re becoming a different person entirely.
When this happens, the old you essentially dies. Old habits, old characteristics, and the old trainwreck that you used to be. It leaves, hopefully for the better. But these struggles are really par for the course.
“You learn very little from peace”. Growth often requires painful experiences, unfortunately. With these painful experiences come the temptation to complain.
So much of the painful experience is our own resistance to reality. It’s our intolerance for the “new life” that is in the foreground.
Dr. Chatterjee puts it like this — “Complaining is a sign of being disappointed by the natural order of life, where adversities are expected to happen”.
Adversity is one of the most critical and important parts of life in gaining knowledge and growing as an individual. And we rail against it because we’re uncomfortable with something different. We complain.
Dr. Chatterjee also says the more that someone complains, the less accurate their worldview is.
Essentially when we complain over and over, we refuse to accept the reality of our life. We don’t move. We want to reverse something. We want to wake up from the dream that we disagree with, which is now our true reality.
I’ve accepted that there’s no productive place for this disgruntled mindset. If I lack the ability to accept change — to grow — I’m denying my opportunity to live my own life.
But there is no way other than forward. The train is moving and I’m on it, regardless of whether or not I believe I am.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
—Buckminster Fuller
“I was a victim in God’s sandbox, getting chased by fire ants and trying to avoid the rain.” Love this image! Ouch!!!