Blogtober14: very superstitious

okay, not really. but you gotta love seeing Stevie Wonder perform on Sesame Street back in 1973! (don’t even want to know how many other Blogtober14 posters used that one today . . . meh.)

anyway, for a girl with a solid black cat for going on 15 years, it makes sense i’m not that prone to superstitions. but it turns out, my list even shorter than i thought it was going to be:

1. bad always things happen in 3s. sometimes good things, too, but when you get 2 bad ones, you always know there’s gonna be a third.
2. always kiss the car ceiling when you run a red light — or even come close. definitely prevents accidents.
3. always knock on wood to avoid tempting fate. you can never be too cautious.

but there’s one more thing i’ve been wanting to write about, which i’m not sure if it’s a superstition, exactly, but i think it comes close. everything happens for a reason. Spy hates this saying. he just thinks it’s dumb. and it does kind of sound dumb, but i think it’s a perfectly legitimate way of looking at the world. in fact, the The New York Times published an article a couple years ago about the benefits of “magical thinking” like this:

. . . superstitious thought, or “magical thinking,” even as it misrepresents reality, has its advantages. It offers psychological benefits that logic and science can’t always provide: namely, a sense of control and a sense of meaning.

i don’t believe in predestination to the point that our fates are completely sealed. but i do believe that when crazy shit happens (sometimes even non-crazy shit), there is usually something we are supposed to learn or there is something that comes out of it that puts us in the next place in our lives we are supposed to be — whether that means geographically, emotionally, financially or whatever.

the The New York Times also published a piece more recently, criticizing this way of thinking for shifting the way we look at the world in favor of the status quo and against people who aren’t in a good place in life, because it assumes they must have done something “bad” to deserve what’s happened to them.

i definitely don’t think it’s a “good behavior gets rewarded/bad behavior is punished” kind of thing. anybody who’s lived in the world for a day knows life is not even close to that fair that we all get what we deserve. but i definitely believe life mysteriously gives you the people you need to know, situations you need to experience and lessons you need to learn in that moment so you can do what’s next. call it God or the Universe or karma or whatever makes sense to you, but i definitely believe it’s out there.

what are you superstitious about?