Thoughts from the weekend.

Fog! We had fog this morning! Woohoo! I never thought I'd get so excited about FOG. Actually, I'm happy that we have enough humidity to make fog. Another thing I never thought I'd see: Hoosiers spontaneously cheering in WalMart because it started to rain. Seriously. The Official Indiana State Obsession is apparently The Weather, and we loooooovvvveee to complain about it. If it's lovely weather, people gripe about how we'll "pay for it later", or "oh sure, it's doing it while I'm at work", or it's just a tad too warm / too cold / too breezy / not breezy enough / too much sunshine / not enough sunshine / etc. / etc. / etc.
If it's not "exactly perfect" then that's of course prime gripe fodder. But this....this was amazing. People started applauding, and cheering, and trying to pay for their groceries as fast as possible so they could get outside and get rained on before it quit raining. Because it wasn't a very large cloud or anything. But bygolly, it was a rain cloud, so we were bygolly gonna go out and enjoy it. Which I've also never seen here. People try to get under cover as soon as possible so they don't get wet - they don't run out into the rain, as a rule.
This, plus some comments from Pastor's sermon on Sunday, got me thinking - why are people, as a rule, far quicker to complain than we are to express appreciation? We all know it happens - if we do something really nice for someone, but mess up one small detail, what are we going to hear about the most - the 1% we messed up, or the 99% we didn't?
Why do we focus on the 1%? Why do people do that? We've done a lot of volunteering for various organizations, and to be honest, I heard a few "thank yous" while we were doing stuff, but mostly it was things like:
"you didn't do this part right."
"I would've preferred you do it some other way."
"I certainly don't want to criticize, but..."
"The program was too long."
"You should implement MY ideas, they're WAY better than yours."

Not "hey, I've got some great ideas, would you mind if I helped?" Not "Hey, can I do something like that too? Would you mind if I tried it next time?" Not "hey, thanks for helping out - we really appreciate it."

When the appreciation and the "thank yous" do come along, they're very much appreciated. The sad thing is, I can probably count the "appreciators" on one hand.

So, I've made up my mind to try harder to be an "appreciator" instead of a complainer. Sure, there'll be times when I still need to say, "you know, this really isn't going to work," but maybe if I'm more known for expressing appreciation, it won't be taken as criticism so much as an offer to work things out. That's always good.