A few weeks ago, my friend Dan Ryan discovered that I was feeling blue and sent me an email in which he listed ten things which he likes or admires about me.  I think it was ten — though frankly, it could have been two or twenty.  The mere sending of the email charmed me enough that its contents became irrelevant.  His generosity boosted my day immeasurably.

In my darkest times, I’ve been blessed to stumble across good friends and even strangers who injected just this type of salvation into an otherwise bleak time.  These bonuses support my continued quest to live complaint-free.  How can I complain when so many sweet gifts come my way whenever I least expect such bounty? More importantly, what right have I to complaint when instead, I should be grooming myself to watch for the moment when I might rescue someone else from grief with a list of things that I admire about them?

I call these moments “Robert Frost encounters”, and I encourage myself to engender them for others as well as to recognize them when they come my way.  I fill moments when I might otherwise complain with recollections of days when someone has gone out of their way to do something wonderful for me.  Robert Frost moments help drive me forward in this, my second year striving to live without complaining.