When someone says “bad luck,” I think of cognitive distortions. Superstitious people navigate life, playing a silly game with luck, blaming fate when convenient.
I have an arsenal of anecdotes that I draw from when needed. Usually, in some conversation with someone I’ve just met, I’ll throw in a few to get the ball rolling. Each one is designed to provide me with the response needed to move the conversation into an easily answered question or some quasi-deep discussion. The method works great with chatty car-service drivers, relatives that I’ve not seen in ages, or just anyone looking to engage me in small talk. A few of them will be packed away in a special place, ready to be used when I need to employ a more drastic method to get someone to stop talking to me. Those usually involve some level of unpopular opinion on a hot topic of the day or just a generalized emotion I have that puts people off just enough to let me go about my day.
Of these gathered yarns, there is one that is flat-out not true. Not only is the origin that I give not true, but I’m not sure if I even believe it one way or another. I’m not really strongly inclined to go one way or another. But for some reason, I keep it around like that old friend who is a terrible influence on you, but you’ve just known them so long, you can’t cut them loose.
When I or someone else does something, and another person points it out by saying the action is ‘bad luck,’ it often sparks a conversation about superstitions. From the very beginning of my spiel, I am lying when I say, ‘My grandmother would always say, “It’s bad luck to be superstitious.” It’s not one I can throw out for anyone who knew either of my grandmas, because it is so far out of place or chance that they would utter anything like this. The only superstitions they trafficked in were those bound within the Evangelist’s Book of the Dead – what most would simply call ‘The Bible’. Never once did I hear either of them mention anything about luck. I think when I first started saying this, I didn’t attach anyone else to it and just said “It’s bad luck to be superstitious” and it sparked the conversation and faux-intellectualism that I had hoped for, but when I started to add “my grandmother would always say…” to it, well then it became folky enough to breakthrough a few layers and really got people thinking.
First, it is such an incredibly simple and dumb thing to say. But it was a good test of people when you first meet them. If they found it deep, thought-provoking, or had strong opinions about superstitions, you could easily squeeze five or ten minutes of conversation out of it – only for me to shrug at the end with a casual ‘Well, who knows,’ perfectly summing up what a brilliant waste of time the whole thing had been. The ones who would defend the action as bad luck, the true believers as it were, would never surprise me with how offended they’d be. The idea that you wouldn’t join them in the belief that stepping on that crack was putting your own mother, your own flesh and blood, in mortal danger was an afront to them and their sun-worshiping pantheon. When later on something went wrong – even just slightly – the person who castigated you for “splitting the pole” would point to that magical faux pas as the reason you got a parking ticket.
I’ve always found superstitions to be fascinating because the fear they inflict seems to infect people regardless of social standing, intelligence, or age. Even if they didn’t believe in the ones that were big and established: a black cat crossing your path as you drop a mirror and spill a saltshaker, some people will have their own superstitions that they’ve created and cultivated about wearing a lucky tie or having a pregame ritual that put your mind in the right place to perform.
When I think about the things I do or don’t do for made up reasons, I am left with mere phobias and borderline mental afflictions. If someone wants to teach me the benefits of knocking on wood or reprimand me for infractions of their made-up moral code, I listen, but I do so half-heartedly. There is a part of me that wants to launch into the real reasons I don’t look out for cracks in the sidewalk or give one holy hell of a shit about these superstitions, because the things turning in my brain are far more severe. For a long time, I was convinced I would have to think of all of the horrible things that could happen to me or people I loved because if I thought about it, it would reduce the chances of it happening. Don’t want to be in a car accident? Think about it all of the time while you’re driving. Don’t want a snake to crawl up through the drainpipe while you’re taking a bath? Take showers and keep your head on a swivel.
Sometimes, I think about plunging the conversation into these depths, but it’s never really happened. I just want to tell people that it isn’t that I think these little adorable fears of theirs are unfounded, it is just I don’t have the mental capacity to include them in my own catalog of terror and have found little reason to. Their tiny insignificant ideas of trepidation pale in comparison to those of us who suffer from illnesses that cause us to not just think about bad luck, but of the sun exploding and wiping out all of life on our planet.
For a long time, I was convinced I would have to think of all of the horrible things that could happen to me or people I loved because if I thought about it, it would reduce the chances of it happening.
If I was to sit here and think of all of the things like this that creep into my thoughts, these cognitive distortions, I would be paralyzed. Obviously, people who buy into these superstitions still walk down the sidewalk, take a chance with handling mirrors, and some even (I assume) own black cats, but they all come off as playing a silly game with this idea of luck. “I am glad, and indeed hopeful, when I come across them because they’ve relegated this nonsense to old wives’ tales that they can believe in when it suits them or when they need fate to blame for something out of their control.
Some of the time, not very often, but some of the time people come around with a few words exchanged about the idea and agree that yeah maybe if you’re paying too much attention to being superstitious, you’ll see bad luck in everything, giving way to what I really want to talk about which is that the things that are in our control should outweigh the thoughts we have about things outside of that control. Luck, as it is most commonly referred to, is not a skill or blessing, it is merely an attribute we attach to the moments of our life to convince ourselves that once in a while, maybe not very often, but once in a while, fate smiles upon us.
Without these cosmically charged layers we place over the mundane parts of our lives, we’re left with just the sand sifting through the hourglass, the moments passing meaninglessly as we drift along through time, and the overwhelming realization of how truly small we are. For me, however, I find divine relief in that diminutiveness. I am a small creature that exists unto myself, making my own luck, forging my own way – free to step on any cracks, smash any mirrors, befriend cats of any color and creed – and live my life unencumbered by the fear that a non-existent superbeing is pulling the strings of the world around me.
It’s like my grandmother would always say…
