Hammering away at the tablet, sitting at my dining room tabe, I wince and utter a noise. Not a word — just a grunt of disgust. In the living room, my son looks up from his computer. “What’s wrong?” He asks, and I realize that I have almost done it — I’ve almost uttered a complaint, day four, not even a week into my quest to go a year without complaining.
“Nothing is wrong,” I assure him. “I’m trying to learn WordPress and it seems to be set so as not to be mobile-compatible. I just have to find the setting, I’m sure.”
A small exchange, but one which reminds me that the act of complaining permeates conduct, words, actions, even noises. That little glance around the room — that can be a complaint. I started this journey acknowledging that this is so, and here is a reminder for me, on day four.
And my reply rings true. Nothing is really wrong. Even if I haven’t learned to use WordPress in a way which enables me to do so from my tablet, and even if I never do, nothing is really wrong.
Fresh from listening to three hours of Marshall Rosenberg (the red-shirt series, on Youtube, posted in nine-minute increments by user who has met my need for a manageable viewing), I have a keen awareness that “wrong” exists only in my mind, in the sense of if there is a “wrong” there is a “right”. It is not wrong that WordPress as I’ve set its parameters is not preently configured to be mobile- compatible; it just “is”. I might have a need, Rosenberg would say, that hasn’t been met. My need is to be able to use WordPress on my tablet as it is my mobile computing device. But it isn’t “wrong”; it just “is” that way. I can be upset about it, or I can drill around dashboard and figure out how to change the settings. If I can’t determine how to change the settings, I can learn to work around the cumbersomeness.
In one of my two favorite movies, “When A Man Loves A Woman”, one of the main characters says to the other, “this adult stuff is really fun, isn’t it?”. In the same spirit, I say to myself, as my son settles back onto the couch, that learning to live without complaining is “reallly fun”, a phrase here used to mean “challenging”.
Day 4: Still complaint-free!