People seem to complain a lot. It is so easy to overhear folks in the store or workers chatting with each other or even people sitting in a restaurant and often they are complaining. The talk seems to be much about something someone else did or didn't do or if it was done wasn't done in the way the person wanted it done or would have done it themselves. Or its one person complaining about work and their job: how rotten it is and how the boss doesn't listen or care. On and on and on it goes and the other person often tries to one up with the tales of their own. Life must really suck.

Of course the other person is always wrong government or some business is doing something to them. There must be this vast conspiracy because this person seems to experience this slight everywhere. It is always a major inconvenience or a perceived slight or the other person is a complete jerk.

Of course some degree of complaining is warranted and there are incompetent people out there in the wrong jobs who could care less about you or anything they are doing and there are legitimate things going on that are not all positive. I can also assure you if you monitored my speak for a while you would find me periodically in complaint mode.

But I can take this only so much from others and from me. As I get older and perhaps wiser and more tolerant my threshold is getting shorter, especially from me. While I have had challenges and adversity at points in my life and some serious stuff to overcome, I do in many ways consider myself very blessed and I try to remember that when I start to down the complaint road.

It takes perhaps a little more energy to try to be positive or to find something positive about something or someone or to just brush off these "inconveniences" or interrupt the complaint mode and put it aside. It just takes more practice.

Yesterday I learned something about someone I used to work with, someone I hired and trained and worked closely with for a few years up until a couple of years ago. A friendly, gentle, bright, hard working guy a few years older than me and with whom for more times than not, I enjoyed working with.

He got up yesterday morning; he probably showered and shaved and packed up his lunch and read the paper over breakfast. Maybe put out the trash and recycling. He perhaps stopped for a coffee on the way to work or filled up his car with gas for the commute and for plans he had after work. He went into work and probably once he got there visited with folks and settled into his office for work.

A few hours later he stumbled out of his office asking for help and died of a heart attack.............

So what was it I had to complain about?

Reality check!