Beyond Whining
When you become a grown-up, you stop whining. This doesn’t mean that you never complain, but you don’t complain from the place of a disempowered child. You complain as a grown-up who might be mad as hell about something, but doesn’t collapse into powerlessness.
We may stop whining to others when we recognize that it’s not acceptable, but continue to whine inside. It’s not so much a matter of simply cleaning up our act, then, but of shifting our attitude. The real change comes when we align with a stronger, more mature part of ourselves.
I am not saying that a mature person never whines, but they don’t take their whining too seriously. The mature person recognizes that she or he is whining and is watching it, taking an experimental attitude. “I’m whining right now. How does that feel? What do I need?”
Just as a mother learns to distinguish why her baby is crying, we can learn to distinguish the cause of our whining. It’s important not to suppress the whining before you’ve heard the need. How will you know what needs attending if you do not listen?
I think we are usually either whining in protest or whining because we want something that we don’t know how to get. If this is true, we can move beyond whining when we learn how to protest effectively and when we become responsive to our own needs.
Just this morning I felt myself whining about working hard and my body being sore. I was feeling that place of deprivation where there is very little nourishment coming in. I listened for a moment and decided to schedule a massage and use that time to really take in the caring touch that would help replenish me.
Listening this way helps us develop a nourishing, caring attitude toward ourselves. It helps if we have experienced that kind of responsiveness from someone else (perhaps a therapist or friend if not a parent) and can internalize that. Unfortunately, many of our models have shown us a false kind of caring. We don’t want to be like the parent who buys off the child with a new toy. We want to respond specifically to the need at hand. When we are really “met,” we don’t need to whine. I bet most whiners haven’t been listened to.
If we make a study of whining, we see not only what people want but also what they are identified with. One of the things that single people whine about the most is not having a partner. On the surface, it would seem that the need is obvious. But when we look at the tone, we learn a lot more. Why does a person want a partner? There’s a world of difference between, “I’m sure hungry for a lover! Boy, am I looking forward to that!” and “I have no one to love me. How will I ever survive?” What bothers me most about this latter position is that the people are not seeing themselves clearly. They are still under the illusion that they are a child. The essence of growing up is that you don’t feel like a child any more.
Another thing we whine about is being inconvenienced. We have to make two trips rather than one, or we can’t fit something into our schedule when we would like. It could be quite enlightening to practice accepting inconvenience as part of life, or, more radically, to practice “no preference.” Practice letting anything be okay. Convenient fine, inconvenient fine.
Here is a poem and a commentary from an unfinished manuscript of mine.
Way up on the branch
the nightingale sings
unperturbedby the conditions
around her.
Winds blow fiercely,
the nightingale sings.
Rain pours down,
the nightingale sings.
Death creeps near,
there is pain in her throat,
the nightingale sings.
Commentary: Outer circumstances do no inhibit the expression of true nature. Thus the wise do not concern themselves with these changes. Expansion fine, contraction fine. Success fine, failure fine. It is only the ego that struggles against circumstances. What do these things matter if you are singing your heart’s song?
This, of course, is the deepest level of resolution. It is going beyond the part that gets its feathers ruffled. Whether that is ego or the disempowered child, the effect is the same. Without that piece of identity, without the drama of our story, we find something more interesting to do.
