No Complaints

I was sitting with a friend who had spent the better part of his life helping people. Some of those people were students he worked with every day when he was a teacher, and others were people he would never meet but whose lives he hoped would be improved by the work he did for a socially conscious non-profit. He was the kind of person who saw problems in the world, and asked himself if he didn’t try to fix them, who would?

The world needs such people, though I’m not one of them. I’m a storyteller, which means I dream of troubles and see how they will resolve themselves. On this day, I did have a problem that was on my mind. Actually, the real problem I had was I wanted something to talk about, wanted to take a little conversational journey, but nothing was coming. So, I started going on about how I wished I had a room where I could write. We had a small house and two kids and it felt a little crowded. Sometimes, the writing didn’t go so well. I needed quiet to write. Wouldn’t my own room solve this?

My friend commenced to draw up a new floorplan for our house on a napkin. We could build a room off the kitchen. Our backyard had plenty of space for it, and an office didn’t need to be more than a 100 square-feet. I hated this plan. I liked our kitchen the way it was, and, anyway, I didn’t want my own room so badly that I would go through the trouble and headache of hiring and then living with contractors in my life hammering away for a month. I said, no thank you, but he kept telling me I should just add it, that it would solve my problem. You said you had a problem, he reminded me, and this would solve it.

We got into a little spat. He called me childish and I thought of a lot of things I wanted to call him but didn’t. It was such an irritating exchange. Can’t a fellow just complain a little to pass the time? It called into the question the value of complaining itself. Surely, I thought, if you don’t do it a little, you’ll just live with your problems forever. I wasn’t sure about this, but I decided complaints were at least poor conversation-starters, particularly if it wasn’t help you wanted but just the feeling of being with someone and going somewhere interesting together.

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Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
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