Change the Way You Think
As soon as the complainer was out of the store, my grandmother would call me to stand in front of her. And then she would say the same thing she had said at least a thousand times, it seemed to me. “Sister, did you hear what Brother So-and-So or Sister Much-to-Do complained about?” And I would nod. Mamma would continue, “Sister, there are people who went to sleep all over the world last night, poor and rich and white and black, but they will never wake again. And those dead folks would give anything, anything at all for just five minutes of this weather that person was grumbling about. So you watch yourself about complaining, Sister. What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. Don’t complain.”
It is said that persons have few teachable moments in their lives. Mamma seemed to have caught me at each one I had. Whining is not only graceless, but can be dangerous. It can alert a brute that a victim is in the neighborhood.
