Day 14 - Letting Go of Whining
Would you like a little cheese with that whine? ~Mom
I’ve spent the entire day whining about not having good access to the Internet. Never mind that the reason I don’t have access is because of a ridiculously stupid thing that I did! (More on that later, I’m sure!) Anyway, I had found all kinds of hilarious quotes about whining on the Internet and was simply going to post a bunch of them and let that be my post. To be honest, I was looking forward to sort of taking a day off from writing. Now I have no access to the Internet, except for through a hotspot, so I will not make the effort (or use the data on my phone plan) to find all those quotes again. Wah, wah…But, for the record… A few quotes that I sort of remember go something like this:
Meme of a boy and a girl facing each other with the boy holding his arms up a bit as if holding a shield. Boy says, “Pew…pew…pew. That’s the sound of your bitching hitting my happiness shield.”Another one is a cartoon of a woman standing up in church, obviously praying. “Lord, I bring all these prayer concerns to you now…but most of ‘em sound like whining to me.”And finally… The Whiny train got derailed at the corner of SuckItUP and GetOverIt.
Anyway, why do we whine? We whine mostly because we are unhappy with the injustices of life and are basically unwilling to do anything about them. Whiners are not fun to be around. It’s hard to be friends with whiners. They’re kind of like drippy faucets. They whine about the weather. They whine about their clothes. They whine about their job. They whine about their kids. The list goes on. Nothing seems to make them happy.Sometimes people feel trapped. I get that. I felt trapped today because I am pretty naive when it comes to technology. It’s easy to slide into a feeling of hopelessness when you feel trapped and hopelessness starts the wheels on the whiny train. I admit to being there today and I was not fun to be around.Thank goodness for a phone call with a friend who sort of shocked me out of my whining. More than that, I’m grateful for my husband who told me to go out for a run and get over it. Yeah, that’s the ticket! I needed to get over my petty self and DO something about it. I’m now in the process of learning how to reformat my computer. Not something I wanted to learn today, but today is (apparently) the appointed time and I might as well do it.I’ll quit now, except for one last observation. Whining is very much a “first world” problem. My friends who lived in mud huts in Central America didn’t whine much, if at all. Maybe our levels of entitlement create a fertile environment for whining??Here’s our exhortation: Do everything without complaining or arguing… (Philippians 2:14)