It’s All Good, (Then again, Maybe Not)

Is the increasingly common catchphrase a sign of courage and understandable response to what can’t be changed, or is it denial and fatalism?

Ryan Mendoza on unsplash. “It’s all good.” The cheery, positive response to the frustrating, the troublesome, and the problems beyond our control may be a way of prioritizing and accepting what we can’t change. Similar to “it is what it is.” Not everyone sees these things as all good. Who is right?

“It’s all good,” Mark would say. Both palms open with fingers pointing up, he would wave them from side to side several times. I met Mark about two years ago, and I find myself repeating his catchphrase on many occasions, even waving my hands in front of me like he does. I’ve also noted that the simple saying has become common in conversations with others. Strangely, it is most often said when things really aren’t so good. The hand waving appears to push back the negativity, fears and worries in a commitment to reassurance.

Mark, too, would often use that saying when confronting some situation, or person, or conversation, or news report that really wasn’t all good. Saying that was a way of waving it off, of dismissing it as relatively unimportant in the overall scheme of things, and of recognizing that like most things that are unpleasant in our lives, we can do little about it.

Sometimes it seems we are in an “it’s all good moment” in history. We face a list of uncertainties and causes for worry the likes of which most of us have never seen before. Most of us weren’t there for Pearl Harbor or the 1918 pandemic, nor the crash of 1929 and certainly not the bubonic plague. Things could be…