More Thoughts on Complaining

I was attending the final meeting of my book club last night and we were all talking about people who ‘give things up’ for Lent. Someone had brought chocolate for our nibblies, and one of the ladies said oh no, she shouldn’t, it was Lent. Different ones talked about giving up treats, wine, chocolate. When it came to me, I said I had committed myself to giving up ‘complaining’.

People were a little shocked at first.

And when they asked me to talk about that, I told them that I had been thinking about this topic for some time and, recently, reading more about it. I decided to see if I could go through the entire 42-day period of Lent without complaining, griping, whining, etc.

It’s one of those useless activities anyway – like worrying. It serves no purpose except to reinforce your own negative thoughts. It doesn’t solve anything, bring you peace, create joy or harmony in your life. It’s just a habit. And one which I have chosen to bring my consciousness to.

That’s all you really need to do.

Bring your awareness to something, and you begin to see it in an ‘enlightened’ way.

And I must say, I’ve certainly felt a lot less stress since Lent began. Now, when there is something that I need to have changed, I simply ask the person who can change it to do so.

Eckhart Tolle talks about this in his book “A New Earth”. He uses the example of the person in the restaurant asking the waiter to change his soup because it is cold.

That’s not complaining; that’s just asking for something to be changed.

And when things cannot be changed, I accept what is. (Of course, that is quite often the hard part.) But resisting what can’t be changed is very stressful; it robs you of your joy, takes away your energy. Remember once a moment is gone, it’s gone forever. So if you spend a moment in a manner that reduces your joy, you cannot get that moment back.

Last week I challenged you to go for a week without complaining. Did you accept the challenge? If so, I’d love to hear about your week. If not, I invite you to go for it; you might just find that your days are far less stressful, and you might discover that you can indeed bring more joy into your life.

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Fun Police.

My daughter(s) sometimes have called me the “Fun Police”. At least, they did so when they were younger.

And I disagreed with that; or so I thought.

But I overheard myself telling my daughter how I had hid this roll of craft paper behind a table, so that they couldn’t find it and ‘make a mess’. (Their dad had brought home a huge roll so that he could wrap gifts for some door prizes and had told them they could have the left-overs.)

As you might imagine they had a ball, making tubes, pipes, kites, airplanes, etc. And leaving little bits of paper everywhere! And they were totally not interested in helping pick up the bits, either. So I did it. And hid the rest of the roll.

It seemed to make sense at the time. I mean, if they weren’t going to clean up after themselves, then they couldn’t do the craft, right? Isn’t that the rule?

So as I was telling my daughter about this, she chastised me – “Mom, you are totally the Fun Police!” This time, I had to agree with her.

As I was growing up, the rule was always ‘Don’t make a mess!” There were hundreds of other rules, too; you know, Work Before Play, Keep Quiet, Don’t Climb that Tree, you’ll fall and hurt yourself, Stop running in and out, Close the door, Don’t colour on the walls, etc. etc.

So I started thinking to myself – what if I threw out all the rules? What if I just let my grandkids enjoy themselves and have fun? What a lesson that would be! And I wondered, could I even do that? Would I be cringing inside, gritting my teeth, biting my tongue?

Part of me expected to get a headache, or at least need a serious bath or something afterwards. I certainly didn’t expect that I would actually enjoy myself with them.

My friend, Nadine, does this beautifully. She comes home from work with her children and promptly sets about doing something fun with them. She makes popcorn and goes outside to jump on the trampoline, she plays hopscotch with her daughter, makes a snowman with her son. She’s a great example for me to follow.

I find it interesting that she doesn’t seem to worry about the mess and even more interesting that there isn’t much mess EVER in her home. Does she do all the clean-up herself? Does she have the children do it with her? She comes from a country where she had a full-time maid, and likely never had to worry about cleaning up the mess. But now she’s here in Canada and has no maid, And she works a full-time job as well as taking care of the house, the laundry, the meals, the shopping, the kids – etc., etc.

I don’t know how she does it; but I think I’m going to ask her. And then maybe I can enjoy some of the fun stuff with my grandkids, without getting a headache. And maybe then I can throw out some of those rules, and stop being the Fun Police.