Is (Was) it Bad Luck?

I really tried my best to think as far back as I possibly could to more or less when I was introduced to the term ‘bad luck.’ This was slightly difficult because I cannot say with certainty that the period of time that I recalled is on fact the earliest in my life. So, I am just going to trust my memory. Here goes …

But first, I hope you have read my introduction to this series,

When I was in grade 3 (2008), I was close friends with one of my classmates, but we had a weird but I think healthy competitive relationship. For some reason we really enjoyed comparing test results. Thinking about grade 3, it was just spelling test, every Friday, numeracy tests, and probably also handwriting tests because grade 3 was the first time we were being introduced to writing with pens and in cursive (happiness had a different meaning back then).

Although we were competing, I was mostly winning – true story. There was this one day when it was raining . We all had umbrellas and raincoats etc. That was when this classmate and friend of mine was telling me that “it is bad luck (7 years, I think) to have an umbrella open indoors.” I do not remember all the details of this conversation, but what happened next felt significant to me. As I mentioned, I was mostly winning in our test competition – still a true story, until it wasn’t. All of a sudden I experienced this friend doing better than me in at least the next 4/5 tests. All I could think about was, “Did I have my umbrella opened indoors that one day?”

Superstition: a widely held but irrational belief in supernatural influences, especially as leading to good or bad luck, or a practice based on such a belief.

Dictionary

It is so crazy sometimes when I think about the idea of superstitions and bad luck. Where do people (I am people too) come up with all these things? Who actually proved without a doubt that these theories hold? And there are so many of them it really isn’t possible to track the origins but we try.

I used to believe in most of these because I was jumping in a bandwagon and it was just interesting to talk about it. It still is just a little bit.

I posed a question before – Why are we quick to say that it was luck, instead of hard work (good) and a simple mistake (bad)? I guess it really is so much easier to trace back our current mishaps to that one time when we walked under a ladder or saw a broken mirror. Equally easier to attribute our success to finding a four leaf clover or walking around with a horseshoe.

Nobody wants to really blame themselves or to really accept that their success is theirs not some supernatural influences. I also think that it is very easy for people to get into our heads to actually believe in these things. I think that is what happened to me in grade 3. It probably wasn’t intentional, I just wanted the easiest explanation and I could not admit that I started relaxing in my studies. Such is life.

This was a very basic story of when I started to believe in luck or whatever that was. Honestly though, we come across unfortunate events in our lives all the time. We even go as far as setting dates aside like Friday the 13th for it. When we see others thriving and we feel a bit stagnant, it does not mean that we are experiencing bad luck, it simply means that we are not running the same race/marathon and comparison will definitely not get us closer to our intended finish line.

I guess that is all for today. What do you think about Bad Luck and where it comes from? What are some of the superstitions that you started believing in for weird reasons? Always lovely to read in the comments section.

Thank you so much for your time. Much love, light and appreciation. Share widely on all your socials. Namaste.