People can often spend an unnecessary amount of time resenting and complaining about the things around them, people do this because it is the easiest thing to do. Having a critical or overly skeptical outlook will cause further resentment towards relatively mundane things. Complaining a lot is a sign that the individual is too focused on the outside world rather than focusing on themselves and improving themselves. Having a mindset that is constantly negative will only bring negative situations into your life. Allowing yourself to be the main focus will empower you to do things that your previous self, thought were unachievable. I used to think of life in a very negative light until I came across an article on Miyamoto Mushashi.

“Resentment and complaint are appropriate neither for oneself or others.”

>Miyamoto Mushashi<

Miyamoto Mushashi was known as a Kensei in Japan, a sword saint, because of his impeccable track record. He went undefeated in all of his 61 duels. The respect and honour this man has achieved, from 1584 to 1645, is something incredible. His reputation is one of the reasons his quote affected me to such a degree, and therefore I decided to use it for my credo. After coming across this quote, I realized how much I complain and just generally have a bad attitude towards things that I don’t even know much about. Pouting and complaining used to be my default reaction to most things and I didn’t realize how detrimental it was on my life and my general experiences.

Quarantine was a tough time for all of us last year. It was when people were significantly more afraid of covid-19 and annoying precautions had to be taken before doing anything. This was around the time that I stumbled across this quotation. It had been around 2-3 months since lockdown had first started and I was not in a good place, mentally speaking. I was bored out of my mind and I was not getting any sleep. The days started to blend together and I didn’t even know what month it was. I started to complain about anything and everything, even the stuff I previously had enjoyed. Basically, I was losing it, like most people who were stuck in lockdown. I then came across this quote and realized I could have been spending my time a lot better. I decided to catch myself before I could complain about anything. This simple method changed the way the rest of my lockdown time was spent. I convinced my parents to let us get a dog and now we own a beautiful pitbull mix. As I said previously, dropping resentment and complaints will allow you to achieve things you previously thought were impossible. My parents were strictly against owning and raising a dog but I convinced them to let us get one.

My parents were both born in India, making me a second generation immigrant. We would often visit our hometown back in Punjab. The poverty rate in India is quite high considering it is the second largest country in the world, in terms of population. Our family had a middle class home in Chandigarh, Punjab. Although, there were also homeless people living in the streets behind our house, they were not as fortunate as us. I discovered all these people when I was around 11-13 years old. Seeing the living conditions of these people really made me think about how good I have it. From that day forward I would remind myself of what other people are living like. Therefore the problems in my life seemed insignificant and not problems at all. It changed the way I viewed things and made me happier to encounter the “problems” in my life.

• https://www.mindspeaks.co/personality/miyamoto-musashi-samurai-with-a-pen/
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Miyamoto-Musashi-Japanese-soldier-artist