A little known fact about the universe is it has its own complaints
department, access to which is available to everyone except the
faint-hearted. Here's how it works.
When something happens about which you wish to complain or when
something happens you deem unfair or when there are things in your life
which you don't like, go outside on a starry night and tell the stars
what happened. Tell the stars what you don't like about what happened.
Complain to the stars how you would have had what happened turn out
differently than the way it turned out.
The universe's complaints department is very, very efficient. The
universe has provided millions and millions and millions of stars to
listen to you complaining. Certainly it's not understaffed. Yet its
real value is not its ample staffing. Its real value (and arguably its
only value) occurs after you notice exactly what the stars do in
response to your complaint.
The universe, it would seem, is divinely indifferent to our complaints,
to our predicament, to any predicament. In response to our
complaints the universe does absolutely nothing except continue to be
the universe. This is it! You complain, and
"So what?!".
Be careful: there's value in noticing living life from
"this is it" is a clearing for possibility rather than for resignation
ie for simply giving up and getting by.
Living life from "this is it" is not your birthright. You're not born
with it. You literally have to make it up, to generate it from nothing.
That's the real value in complaining to the stars and getting
nothing in return. You are here and this is it. What
happens next is either the probable almost certain future (which you
already got: it's the sequel to whatever you complain about) or
whatever you create as possibility - a discontiguous, unpredictable
outcome for which you're the source ie with which you are at cause.
The difference between the universe's response on a starry night to our
complaints and peoples' response to our complaints is that there's
no other response from the universe other
than "I got it - what's next?" or "I got it - what else you
got?", whereas people (albeit well-intentioned) invariably add
something to appease our awkwardness and discomfort at being up against
the
inexorability
of coming up with whatever is next for us to create in life.
Creation isn't change. Change changes something which already exists.
Creation is inventing something new out of nothing. So in order to
create something truly new you have to start with nothing. You have to
be able to create nothing and to create experiencing nothing such that
nothing is OK. To appease or to over sympathize with a complaint really
freezes the complaint in time, unwittingly alleviating experiencing
nothing and interfering with getting "this is it - what's next?".
Alleviating experiencing nothing is absolutely
deadly
to creativity: nothing new can happen except the probable almost
certain future.
I told My Best Friend everything I don't like about my life. He
listened and said nothing.
Man! How I yearned for him to say something ... but he didn't. Yet that
(I realized later) is what makes him My Best Friend! I
didn't realize at the time the gift My Best Friend bestows on me by
listening then saying nothing is nothing less than the divine
indifference of the universe. When the stars do it I may miss it. If
another person does it I may
interpret
that they're ignoring me or that they're disinterested or that they
don't want to be involved. But coming from My Best Friend it's patently
getable. He really loves me enough to say nothing. He really loves me
enough to grant being to who I really am and not to my complaint or to
my story. Out of that I notice that in untransformed relationships we
grant being to our complaint and to our story but not to who we really
are. We have it ass backwards.
The next time I complained ie after I vented the complaint, I was newly
empowered to invent the next possibility for my life. When speaking
results in complaint, the probable almost certain future is just the
sequel to the complaint. When speaking results in possibility, the
future is open.