Wednesday's Woes  "What Is and Is Not a Woe"

Wednesday...hurdle day, hump day, or the day "full of woe," as the old nursery rhyme claimed  (or was that just for the child born on Wednesday...at any rate, it doesn't sound good!)  Whatever you call Wednesdays, it seems a good day to try to be a bit lighter, to look on the bright side, and to hurl ourselves over that hurdle as gracefully and easily as humanly possible!

Besides, "woe" is an awfully strong word...and for good reason, I think.  To be "full of woe" like the pitiful child in the nursery rhyme, means to be full of deep misery, affliction, suffering, or grief.  For most of us, thank God, this is not the stuff of your average Wednesday!  Woe, woeful, and woe-be-gone are words for dramatic, powerful emotions, and not of the happy variety!  Think Scarlett O'Hara with hand to her forehead, beseeching her maid whose name now escapes me, "What'll I do, Where'll I go?"  Or, more recently but no less dramatically, think Bridget Jones in her opening scene flailing a spent wine glass and TV remote while belting out "All By Myself," poignantly and hysterically bemoaning her lonely Londoner existence.  Now that's woe!  Woe is not the stuff of our adolescent days which had us proclaiming "Life stinks!" "My life is over!" With the passage of time, that stuff that seemed so dreadful (even woeful) back then, wouldn't even warrant a deep sigh or a rise in blood pressure here in "grown up world."  True woe is the stuff of life that we, hopefully, cannot even imagine in our young years and that we learn to discern as the years travel through us and strengthen us.  If you witness someone carrying on horribly about something that is definitely not "woe-worthy," then it's a sure bet they have not yet experienced real woe.   Real woes put that pit in your stomach, that catch in your breath, that pounding in your chest, and those hot tears in your eyes.  The good news about woe is...it's very democratic.  All of us have felt woe, or will feel woe, before we walk off this stage...one of Life's few guarantees.  In fact, Life is one, hopefully long tutorial on what I'll call the "Wisdom of Woe," learning from experience what is and is not a woe, and how to handle both.

So, on Wednesdays let's try to get through the day and be on the lookout for, and in fact welcome, those little glitches, disappointments, irritants, frustrations and recognize them for what they are...not woes!  Let's huff and puff, grumble and grouse...but at day's end,  perhaps offer a thank you that this was the worst Life tossed at us today.  If something makes a good story a few hours or days later, it is not worthy of the "woe" award..but, in retrospect, it may be worthy of a laugh!  And laughter is one of the few things that wields any power against being woeful.  To this end, on future Wednesdays, I will endeavor to relay some of my "not woes" that, while frustrating or maddening at the time, have since mellowed their way into humorous memory.

Thanks for reading.  Let it steep!