“Oh well”

It’s a simple phrase. It might seem lazy or plain or inconsiderate. It comes across as a sign of indifference and immaturity. Certainly most people wouldn’t accept it as an appropriate, formal response, but that doesn’t mean it is any less powerful or that one should avoid using it.

Personally (and perhaps unfortunately), this is one of my favorite phrases but not without reason. Life is busy and chaotic: Things come up, things happen, and sometimes I find myself in situations I don’t want to be in. Often I find I’m not as prepared for a test as I had hoped. Other times, I realize I miswrote a pinnacle point in an essay or lab report. I never like knowing I have fallen short of my expectations in some way, and certainly I regret not take more steps to avoid letting myself down.

Still, as I turn in my C-grade paper or flawed essay or rushed piece of writing, I often find myself sighing “how well” to myself, not because I won’t remember my mistakes, but because caring about them, then and there, is absolutely pointless.

It’s too late. I should’ve done this and that and avoid that and this, but that’s the past: It can’t be changed. So, to “avoid sweating the small stuff”, as they say, I tell myself “oh well” and move on with my life.

Of course, I am by no means saying that stress is unhealthy. Stress is simply the stimuli of change; we need it to operate on a daily basis, and stressing about deadlines and assignments is healthy motivation. But there is one thing a person can stress about that isn’t healthy: Stress itself.

In 1991, a number of civil servants in London were asked how much they felt stress affected them, or to paraphrase, “how stressed they were about their stress.” 18 years later, they were assessed and researchers found that those who were worried about stress were more than twice as likely to suffer from heart attacks.

While there are a lot of studies done about stress, I hold these results closer to my heart than others. As college students, we’re bombarded by stress on a daily basis, but it’s important to go with the flow too. There are some things that simply can’t be avoided, and once something is happened, it can’t be changed. All we can do is live life, learn from our mistakes, and smile.

For example:

The other day at work, while I was scrubbing dishes, I cleaned alongside a man much older than myself (or nearly any college student for that matter), and I began to wonder why he was working here today. As we got to talking, it came up that he was helping out because we were short-staffed, and he normally worked in a different area students weren’t hired for. I also learned that he had three children, each in a different year of college, and this wasn’t his fulltime job. He explained that he worked 70 or more hours a week in a factory and helped out here on campus for an additional 35 or so. I let it sink in.

The most astounding aspect of this man (who I regret not asking the name of) was not that he worked over a hundred hours a week so that, I assume, he could help put his children through college and let them go to special events, such as his son’s three-thousand two-hundred dollar basketball camp. No, the most shocking aspect was that, throughout the entire conversation, he did not once complain about it. He expressed only that he “chose it”, not even claiming he that he had to. In fact, I only assumed his three children were part of his motivation for working because he never actually gave a reason for why he worked so much.

Here I stood, silently studying this man who was obviously in a tough spot in life but still managed to smile and accept what he had.

Then I realized that we all could learn a thing or two about life from this man.