“Don’t be overheard complaining.  Not even to yourself.  Look inward, not outward.  Don’t complain.  Don’t meddle in the affairs of others.  When you see someone acting objectionably, remember when you have acted that way,” Marcus Aurelius.  The theme of looking inward and taking responsibility for ourselves continues.  I don’t deny that sometimes the world delivers what feels like unfair blows, bestows gifts to those we don’t necessarily feel deserve it (or we have an opinion on it—we’re human, we have ideas of who deserves what 😊).  But when we complain, we are stuck in a state of comparison, essentially saying that what we have isn’t right, it isn’t good enough, it isn’t worthy or something similar.  We’re essentially saying that we don’t belong where we are or the circumstances we are in aren’t correct.  The truth is we will never know that.  All we know for sure is that we only have control over our actions in the moment.  We don’t have foresight to how every circumstance will turn out—we aren’t meant to know every answer to everything.  That’s a lot of weight to carry.  All we can do and all we are responsible for is walking our path—and every step along the way is part of that path, the good and the bad.  We are human, we all make mistakes, we all have faults and flaws—and that is by design.  So why would we complain about things we can’t change? 

Another theme from this week is the concept of time.  Our time here is so incredibly brief, why would we waste any of it being upset about what we can’t change?  Why would we focus on what went wrong versus what we can make right?  Sure, we need to understand what went wrong to avoid similar mistakes again, but if we stay stuck in the wrong, we will never move on to what’s right.  We only have control over our reactions and our decisions and we never know the full story of what someone is experiencing.  Sure, it may look like the grass is greener elsewhere but we don’t know what that person endured to get there.  We don’t always consider that just because certain facets of other people’s lives look good that there are other areas where they struggle.  Often those with impressive gain have equally impressive losses either through taking chances or through some sort of lesson of fate that taught them to move forward.  It isn’t up to us to judge that person.  We never know where they are on their journey.  So yet again, the question remains, why would we waste time complaining about that which we have no control over nor do we fully understand?  We aren’t meant to understand it.

Our time is much better spent on activities that produce the results we ARE looking for.  We may not hit a home run our first time at bat, but the more we swing, we get closer and closer to it until we get our timing and power right to knock it out of the park.  We develop skills and resilience and strength and we learn to appreciate that other people have skills and resilience and strengths in different arenas than ours.  They aren’t competition.  There really is no competition in this world.  Man created it as a means to create a hierarchy and separation over people in an effort to control them.  We need to look at what we have in a different context.  What we have are the tools we’ve been given in our lives.  We’ve spent a lifetime building a kit to help us walk our paths and there will be a time our paths intersect with someone else, perhaps learning the same lesson, perhaps using our lessons as a stepping stone, and we will use those skills to learn something else.  So don’t worry about where we are on the journey—understand that we are on OUR journey and that looks different than everyone else’s.  There is no comparison for that, there is no one who has lived our journey before.  So keep going.