Ain’t It Awful!

Lately, I’ve been playing the “ain’t it awful” card on some of our blogs to show us just how far we are up that proverbial creek without a paddle to our name.  The term could easily be used for many of the newsworthy events of the day, especially during this Covid19 pandemic and all the political quagmires and shenanigans that consume the news, like the insurrection of January 6 or Texas outlawing abortions with wild west tactics where bounty hunters can wear their guns to town to nab those suspicious would-be mothers.

 On a more personal level, most of us experience so many dilemmas throughout our lives and especially all that we’ve been through for the past couple of years.  It has its locus somewhere between a rock and a hard place, and there’s usually no place to put your fulcrum to lift yourself out of the morass. Conflicts with the spouse or children  or parents that seem irresolvable.  Financial crunches or reversals.  Depression and despair. Even Facebook using us to stoke anger and hate. Ain’t it awful!

 Enter the panhandlers and fix‑it philosophers with all sorts of wares for the people in such predicaments.  One says:  “Such difficulty is merely a state of mind.  So if you’ll just work on your mind, you can always win in such matters.  Harness your wagon to the power of positive thinking, and you’ll obliterate anything that prevents you from fulfilling your wonderful self.”  Another peddles consumerism:  “Fill it up to the brim with all these goodies and gadgets and go for it all.  Shop ’til you drop.  As the old poet put it ‘getting and spending we lay waste our powers…'”  Even evangelists claim a desirable form of “good news”:  “Let God be your co‑pilot of convenience.    You won’t need to steer anymore.  Nor think.  Nor feel.  Just glide the rest of the way to gloryland.  The world might be in a hell of a mess, but don’t fret.  No problem.”

Perhaps the most glaring problem in the human predicament is our perpetual blindness that prohibits our seeing that things could actually be worse than they are. The old half-empty and/or half-full glass thing. The calming ability to look around us and see how good life is in spite of all things to the contrary. Once we see that light in our darkness, we can face so many of the awful predicaments that come our way.

I vividly remember seeing such a small and subtle point of light many years ago. We had arrived in one of those villages in Wales whose name was beyond pronouncing, when a sudden rain shower just showed up out of nowhere. Our group of “Crawford Travelers” was caught unaware in the middle of some quaint shops and seemed to be outdone with this pesky change in the weather. During their whining and complaining, I happen to overhear some little old nearby Welsh woman exclaim to her friend, “Could be worse; could be lashing!”

Such a subtle yet extraordinary exclamation was like stumbling over a big pile of stardust. For the rest of that particular trip and for all the trips that would follow, that little phrase from that tiny Welsh lady became a mantra and a watchword to reorient our internal gyroscopes toward seeing the inherent good in just about all we would encounter on our lives’ journeys.