"Can't Complain"

Yesterday, I overheard someone give a unique response to a fairly common question. The question was something along the lines of "how has your day been?" Many people get asked this question regularly, and people tend to answer the question with "Good," "Fine," "Alright," or any word like that. Sometimes, people offer a two-word answer, "Can't complain." But yesterday, I heard a response to this question that I don't think I've ever heard before: "Can't complain. Well, I could, but I don't want to."

How true and profound is that!

Firstly, anyone who says that they "can't complain" about something probably doesn't mean that literally. People can (and do) complain about just about everything. Very few things in life are perfect. In just about everything, there are imperfections about which we could complain. When we compare our lives to others' or even to an imaginary ideal life, we can almost always find something that we could complain about.

But why would we want to? Apart from offering constructive criticism, which complaints often aren't, what good could complaining do? I suppose it could be cathartic to get some complaints off your chest, and it can even help others by letting them know that other people also struggle with and dislike the same things they do. Okay, there are some, perhaps many, valid reasons why a person might want to complain, but there are also many reasons why they wouldn't.

Complaining breeds negativity. The more we complain, the more we dwell on the negative aspects of life. It can't be healthy. We don't want to bottle up our negativity, but we don't want to keep it inside us either. It's better to let the complaints go and to look for the good. Instead of looking mainly at the bad news and the parts that we can complain about, we should consider the good news and the parts for which we can thank God. I believe that people will tend to see what they look for. If that's true, I want to look for the good in the world.

So, yeah, nothing's perfect, and we can definitely complain about it if we wanted to, but who would want to complain about it when they could, instead, focus on the good? Complaining doesn't do much good, but counting our blessings can. In the future, I'm going to try to keep my complaints to a minimum. Sure, I could complain, but I don't want to.