Martha Beck’s Complaint Solution

The only magazine I read that I haven’t (borrowed) from a Dr.’s office is O Magazine. You know, Oprah’s on it so it’s hard to miss.

I always love Martha Beck’s advice most. Last month or the month before she wrote about lateness and who is always late and why. Now, Dr. Phil would have you believe that everyone who is always late is just arrogant and believes the whole world should have to wait for them. This makes me mad about some people in my life who are chronically late. It doesn’t ring true for a friend of mine, however. Martha offered up the advice that perhaps these types of people just live in the moment so completely that they don’t want to stop what they are doing and they lose track of time. It’s a much more charitable way to look at chronic lateness and it not only took away some of my anger about her lateness, but it helped her understand herself and had practical advice on how she could try to be more on time. Good useful stuff.

This month she has an article about complaining and whether we should do it or not. First we complain and complain and some of this is good, it let’s off some pressure. Maybe it even helps us work out what we’re really upset about.

But, then we can either keep complaining or just channel our anger or frustration into action.

When faced with action or no action I usually pick action. I mean, if it’s something that won’t go away by inaction. I decide that even if it’s the wrong choice at least I tried to resolve it some how or some way.

It’s also got a great take on anger. Oh how we people like to run from anger. I write about my anger a little in Self Righteous Anger and My Soul. It’s hard to understand that it’s something that happens within us rather than outside of us.

We don’t want to take responsibility for it. We feel like we can’t control it. But, anger can be a really action-provoking  and therefore a really good thing. If there is an injustice anger tells us action is needed there. If there is a communication break-down it can tell us we have to try something else. We can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result and then bitching about it.

I tried the Complaint-Free World no complaining strategy, which you can read about in Where’s My Freaking Complaint-Free World Bracelet. Frankly, I don’t think I went one single day without complaining. It was frustrating to be focused so much on when I was saying something complaint-like. There’s a lot of injustice and complaint-worthy things in this world and I don’t see how any of it will change if everyone walks around going “Oh, it’s fine.”  Though I think it did help me to stop complaining about stupid crap that I don’t care enough about to fix.

If I care enough to fix it myself, then maybe it’s complaint-worthy. Would that hold up to scrutiny?