Triumph > Conflict

The harder the conflict,

the more glorious the triumph.

-     Thomas Paine

Complaining. I don’t think there is a single person on Earth that can honestly say that they never complain. Everyone is guilty of complaining about something or another at some point during his or her lifetime. But how often? Once a week, once a day, more than once a day? However often we happen to do this, it is most likely too often and more than we should be doing so.

What exactly are we doing when we are complaining? Think about this just for a minute or so. Come up with an answer? Okay, well if so great but regardless I’ll tell you the answer that I was hoping you would come up with. And that is plain and simply: wasting time. Complaining is not advantageous. It does not help us at all in any way. If it does anything at all, that would be holding us back and unfortunately keeping us from moving forward. This is a problem because forward is the direction that we absolutely need to be going.

We can never get back the time we have spent complaining in the past and continue to spend complaining presently. Time is just one of those things; once it is gone, its gone for good. You know as well as I do that this sucks, but at least it is possible for us to do something about it in this specific case. We can start accepting things for what they are, no matter how difficult they may be. The sad thing is that it is not even only when things are difficult that we complain; we then complain when things become too easy for us or for a wide variety of other reasons.

When we stop complaining, we find that we can actually achieve whatever it is we need or want to do. Besides we always feel way more accomplished and proud of others or ourselves when the task that has been completed correctly was harder than most other tasks. The majority of people throughout history that we recognize as successful or accomplished today are known for being proficient and doing great things. Thomas Paine is surely one of these people and for good reasons, so it makes perfect sense for this quote to have come from him.

Let the lesson for this week be to do whatever it takes to get where you would like to be in life. In the end, the celebration usually makes all of the hard work and pain and suffering worth it.