Complaining, the Conclusion

I’ve been talking to my daughter and a close friend about complaining; coincidentally, they’re both therapists.  I seem to be looking at the negative side to complaining and yet it’s obvious from my own complains that complaining is not such a terrible thing.  And I have to admit I must have issues about complaining, and sometimes I need to show more empathy when friends share their complaints.  Sometimes, I just find complaints painful or tedious to listen too.  My daughter and my friend both reminded me of some of the positives.  Complaining helps us find comfort for our dis-ease.  It helps us examine and understand our feelings.  My friend put it well:  “Complaining is fine as long as it’s productive.”  But even when we’re working on a productive solution for our complaints, there’s often an urge to be scornful of those who don’t agree.  It's the scorn that get to me.

I’ve said enough about this.  I haven’t stopped complaining, but I have become very mindful of when I do it, and what I want from it.  And what I can learn from my discontent.

However, I don’t want to leave this topic without these words from Eckhart Tolle:

Loving Robin Williams

Rev. Meg Rily writes about her response to Robin William’s death.  It’s a sweet perspective of why we can feel so saddened by the death of someone “we don’t really know.”  We’re sad because, in a limited but important way, we really do know them.

My Facebook community, at least a significant part of it, is reeling from the suicide of Robin Williams. None of us would deny what one person wrote: "People! This is a celebrity! We don't know him! Let's talk about people we do know!" Undeniable. He was a celebrity, not a personal friend. And yet, it turns out we need to process this together. We do care. We do feel that, in some real way, that we knew him, and our hearts are broken.

Here's what I knew immediately when suddenly he was gone: I loved him. Not the characters he played, some of whom I loved too, but the man I intuited behind those characters. The man. I loved him because I always felt his generosity as a comedian and an actor, I loved even the pain that so obviously was part of who he was, pain that he struggled mightily to transform into humor and joy. I loved the way he reached out to the world with everything he had, and gave it to away.

Complaining, cont'd

Writing about complaining is, I’m sure, the reason I find something about complaining every time I turn on my computer.  The tech spies have marked me.  Here Mark Epstein writes about anger:

If you are angry and you meditate to get rid of your anger, you will only frustrate yourself. Meditate because you are angry, not to eliminate it. Thich Nhar Hanh says we must learn how to hold anger like a baby: we need to learn how to be angry, not how to express or repress it. Whenever we take any emotion and make it into an It (as in "I can't stand it any longer" or "I have to get it out of my system"), we are in trouble.

Complaints, mainly, are a form of anger.  (Yes, when I make a negative evaluation about something,  it can be sharing information or complaining.)  I wonder if I can remember to hold my angry complaints like a baby.