The Universe is Indifferent

MAY 23 ENTRY: Are there any superstitions you believe (or don't believe) in?

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.-Edmund Burke

Interesting choice of prompt, superstitions. Let’s start with a wacky one. So if I, for example, am leaving the house and I am about to leave or on my way to the car and someone calls out my name when my back is towards him, I can’t go. If I leave, I won’t be able to accomplish the task I was setting out to do. I must come back, wait for some time and then leave. Freaky, you betcha. I never believed in it but had to fall in. the worst fact was I got late several times but didn’t matter for mom!

Superstitions, to me, are just excuses people make for not succeeding. They can’t find the courage to take the blame, so they blame it on luck! “Oh! I forgot my lucky penny at home!” ”Damn I wish I wore my lucky undies today!” “Dolores, where’s my lucky tooth that fell off a year ago?” Seriously people, give me a break. If coins, clothes, etc determine the outcome of everything you do, why don’t you tie them around your neck, or keep them in a safe at the bank?

I have never harbored many of these except the lucky pen. In school, I started my exams with one pen and if the first one went well, I’d use that pen to write my name in every exam that term, just to have some of that lucky ink on every paper I wrote. It seems so silly now. I am embarrassed!

You know, I have only been to a casino once but what I saw there, the superstitions that pervade in the masses shocked me. A cowboy had a horseshoe there! A nerdy looking dude was constantly touching a clover like pendant on his chain, this suave lady at the poker table was doing something with her hair… I talked to the nerdy one outside and he said that it was the pendant that won him the bucks! Crazy!

Bjorn Borg, the tennis champ from the 70s had his ridiculous beard that he grew for Wimbledon especially, Rafa, my favorite player, has to set his water bottles at a particular angle each time! It’s everywhere. I remember when I was a teenager, my sister didn’t let me leave the house just after drinking water! Bad luck she said, you must have something else. Superstitions everywhere, literally!

Superstitions are, plainly put, unfounded beliefs often held to help an individual deal with the fear of the unknown. It is not faith, but belief that they will work. Mind you, they are not proven to work but are beliefs, which we cling onto to muster the courage to go through with something and at the same time, have something to blame our failures on. However, to bet money on the basis of a coin flip, to make uniformed decisions just to follow some superstition is, in my book at least, blatant foolishness.

“The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.” - Francis Bacon