That’s a bald-faced lie, of course. Just tonight I saw things that I would have impulsively complained about before. They wouldn’t have been serious, soul-destroying complaints, but complaints all the same. And as I thought of these complaints, the follow-up thought was always the same: Would verbalizing this complaint achieve anything positive or useful? The answer was (and is) always no.
The old saw about not sweating the small stuff works well when applied to daily life complaints. It’s just not worth mustering the negative energy to make the complaints. You maybe get a small, temporary boost when someone affirms your complaint (“Yeah, that brown wallpaper is hideous. There oughtta be a law!”) but it is fleeting, almost ephemeral, and wouldn’t you feel better focusing on something positive instead, or even just keeping quiet and thinking Zen-like thoughts? I don’t have too many Zen-like thoughts, but passing on the complaint has never felt like the wrong thing to do.
Anyway, onto Day 15 and the third and final week. I may still blow it, but I’m confident now that if it happens it will be the result of a genuine minor slip and not just being a crankypants in a foul mood.
