Everyday Canvas

All That Superstitious Fuss

Friday the 13th, also known as Black Friday in some countries, is considered an unlucky day in Western superstition. What's your take?

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Believing in the bad luck of Friday the 13th shows some kind of a confidence in human nature that everything has to have an immediate explanation, no matter how fragile or strange, and everything can be helped with and resolved. It is this false confidence that lets the human beings build tall apartment buildings on sand and cities below water level in the hurricane-prone areas.

Nature is beautiful though in a tricky and sinister way at times, as it can be indifferent, cruel, or uncaring. In nature, everything eats everything else, and the weather and other phenomena can create havoc in our lives without a warning. So are the relationships among groups and nations of mankind because we love to imitate nature for being a part of it.

Living in this harsh environment, we have let our imaginations run loose and let in superstition and dogma to play a role in our reasoning since the beginning of our time on earth. After all, to what we cannot explain, we add up or create coincidences, and find these new revelations to be as good as truthful explanations. This way, our ignorance saves face.

Since trying to find out the truth behind anything can be too difficult a task and one we may not want to deal with, we attach meaning to something totally unrelated. For example, if I slip and fall on a newly waxed floor, I can find fault with my new slippers being unlucky, instead of blaming myself for not taking care where I step. Trust me, this has happened!

A few of the intelligent people have known about this quirk of the human species. Millenniums ago, the father of medicine, Hippocrates said, about epilepsy: “People think that epilepsy is divine, simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that, someday, we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's divine. And so it is with everything in the universe.”

And so it is with Friday the 13th, a black cat, breaking a mirror, leaving shoes upside down, opening an umbrella inside a house, walking under a ladder, stepping on a crack, and so on and so forth. And so it is with me for I feel like crossing my fingers each time I write an entry in my blog.