No complaints.

I aptly came across this quote as I struggled not to complain, having, once again, successfully misjudged my computer's reliability and attributed it with the power to read my mind(unless shouting 'fuck' aloud in the library hoping for sympathy counts as a complaint?);

We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed.
- Fuller, Thomas

At the week's start I thought that the first thing I'd want/need to do would be to release a stream of uninteresting, probably outdated complaints. In reality, with all due respect Thomas Fuller, the assertion that we live complaining is neither true, nor is it useful. Although momentarily, in a moment of near-slippage away from my resolution, I was encouraged by his certain sense that complaining IS WHAT WE DO, my week has been rather pleasanter for my curbing of complaints.

I don't believe myself to be a moaner, and hopefully others don't see me as perpetually complaining, however I have noticed that complaining really seems to be a default option, the lazy option-giving birth to more talking, and less doing. As the dictionary itself admits, complaining covers a broad range of things; the expression of dissatisfaction, uneasiness, pain, resentment or grief. With so many things to complain about surely it can't be eradicated? Where would all these expressions go? What I realised though, is that what I usually do, in voicing my responses to pain, dissatisfaction etc. stops me from gaining any new perspective, and instead invites/forces people into pitying me or equally unburdening their complaints-luckily for me dissatisfactions of my week involved such annoyances as having an essay to write while a couple of friends were going out. Stopping in my well-worn tracks before complaining about such trivialities was pretty useful; I began to do such things as 'applaud, approve, be content, be happy, commend, praise, recommend, sanction' (antonyms of complaining).

While everybody knows that it's what you do that makes you who you are, above what you say, in fact, I realised, it's also kinda what you say. The more I spouted these optimistic responses to, admittedly, minor annoyances, the more I felt optimistic. Though I couldn't stop the moans going on in my head (I think it would have taken more than a week, possibly a lifetime to reach this enlightened state of disaffectedness from my surroundings)I stopped most of them coming out and in the process realised that things were a lot less bad than I thought.