excuse me, i have my rights

Yesterday I was having such a grumpy day. Off-season workouts had just begun, and I legitimately had not been that sore for over two years. Every step I took yesterday, every time I tried to raise my arm, especially every time I sat down or stood up, I experienced the most excruciating pain. Conditioning was supposed to be extra long that night. Add to that the fact that I had not been getting as much sleep as I would have liked for the last few days, and you have a pretty good idea of my state of mind. And, of course, I considered several people to be unusually obnoxious, crunching ice or chewing their gum with open mouths for the entire class period. I was just grumpy.

However, while sitting in literary criticism (discussing Freudian psychology and psychoanalytic literary theory... bleh), I had a bit of a revelation. Who am I to claim all these things from life? I mean, how do I think that it is my right to have a body that is not sore, or to get a full eight hours of sleep a night? I realized how blessed I was to have a body that functioned to the capacity that I could work out and be sore. I recalled this quote by C.S. Lewis:

"Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that [a man] can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered."

I just recently told someone about how firmly I believed in curing flaws NOT by focusing on the unwanted vice, but on the desired virtue. I had resolved to curb my tendency to complain, but my focus was still on not complaining, rather than on being positively thankful. Next on my agenda: realizing that I really have few claims on life that I should expect as basic rights. Being well-rested and free from pain are not basic rights, they are blessings. I want to see life in a consistently grateful way.