On Friday, I challenged myself to go a whole day without complaining at all. Easy, I thought, right? I consider myself to be a very positive person, but lately, I’ve begun to notice that I speak more negatively than I’d like to at times, so I decided to put my positivity to the test. It was definitely not as easy as I expected it to be.

Throughout the day, I vowed to accomplish my goal, but I messed up my self-imposed challenge way more frequently than I thought I would. I kept feeling myself falling into the trap! It made me notice things I never had before. I caught myself when I began to complain that a person in a class the other day was being annoying, and realized negative gossip will get me nowhere. I caught myself complaining that I was too warm because it was hot outside and I foolishly chose to wear a sweater and realized it was probably literally the nicest day of the year and that I should enjoy it. I found that it’s so easy to want to fill a gap in a conversation with “Ugh, I’m so tired” or “I have so much homework to do this weekend,” and I started to ask myself, why do I say things like that? What am I accomplishing by complaining? Absolutely nothing. It made me feel so much better when I thought about it and realized that the things I felt like complaining about were nothing to really complain about at all. Why am I tired? Because I’m running around campus all day doing so many things that make me happy. Why do I have so much homework? Because I’m so very fortunate to be in college taking classes that interest me, and this homework is helping me learn and grow. Everything can be spun in a positive way because there really are positives to everything

The other day, I watched the movie "About Time" for the first time, and this was part of what inspired my challenge to not complain. First of all, it's such a good movie-- I highly recommend it. I’m a sucker for a good romantic movie. But in all seriousness, and with no spoilers, I promise, I’d like to leave you with a quote that really stuck with me from this movie:

“I just try to live every day as if I've deliberately come back to this one day, to enjoy it, as if it was the full final day of my extraordinary, ordinary life”.

Living positively, appreciating every moment, and especially living deliberately are qualities that are incredibly valuable. I learned from my day without complaining that you can’t do these things while complaining about things that clearly do have a bright side. It’s obviously not realistic to never complain at all. Life is rough, folks. And sometimes it feels so good to let out all the negativity. Venting is healthy. But the little complaints I can definitely learn to live without. There’s so much negativity in the world as is-- why add to it? Living to enjoy living is important. Sweating the small stuff is absolutely pointless, and it’s worth everything to pause for a minute and realize that the small stuff is indeed small.