On Thursday I was standing in line at the Pick n' Pay deli waiting to order some food. I had just finished talking to a friend of mine who happened to be at the front of the same line I was in, when I heard something fall onto the floor. I thought I had dropped something, but it turned out that after just over 8 months, the strings of the bracelet I had been given by some random in Chandigarh some time during the second week of September had finally broken.
When I had joined my friend in Chandigarh after a hold-up of an extra night in Bombay when I was told that three weeks after I had booked my flight from Bombay to Chandigarh, Kingfisher had canceled the route due to lack of demand, and now I would have to fly the next morning via Delhi (those this was replacement was provided to me at no charge). Anyway, when I arrived, my friend was hanging with an Aussie gal that he had met in Manali, and we spent a couple of days in Chandigarh before heading back to Himachal Pradesh. During that time, we met a local gal from India who gave us her contact number, and the next day we met up with her she had bought us all little trinkets that were symbols of friendship. I forget what the Aussie gal got, but my friend got a neon rubber wristband, kind of like the Lance Armstrong 'Livestrong' bands, but instead it said 'Be my friend'; and then I get a wristband with five stones of a brown and white mixed colour tied together with strings. At first I thought, 'what am I supposed to do with this? This sort of thing really isn't my thing', but I tied it on anyway, and I hadn't removed it since. Not for sleeping, not for showering, not for playing sports, nothing. But in the last month or so, I saw that the strings had started to really fray and knew that it would be only a matter of time before it snapped off.
But it got me thinking, what is it that I will miss by not having this bracelet on? And then I got to thinking where the whole notion of lucky coins and rabbit's feet and who knows what else endows us with some notion of luck. Is seems like the reality of the situation is something akin to 'the magic feather' in the Disney's Dumbo, which the mouse uses as a psychological trick to convince Dumbo that he can fly. At a later time during one of the stunts, Dumbo loses the magic feather, but the mouse is able to convince him that it actually has nothing to do with the feather at all. It's simply to do with ability.
So how is it that we attribute our good fortune to the possession or lack thereof of some trinket? A lot of it is, of course, simply down to psychology. It is a sort of 'crutch' to give us confidence when we need it, and provide us with a means to exonerate us of responsibility if/when we fail. In a way, it works sort of like a horoscope. If you're horoscope is good, you will face the day with a positive outlook and try to make stuff happen, giving the best chance to get results. If your horoscope is not so good, you may end up approaching it as such and missing opportunities or rejecting them out of a certain amount of pessimism. However, as far as I know, most studies claim that if we lived our lives outside of knowledge of horoscopes, our success/fail rate would be pretty close to the good day/bad day rate that our corresponding horoscopes would give us. But then again, I can't really say for certain that the manner in which the stars interact has some bearing on the manner in which we function. However, given that the night sky is simply a projection of 3-dimensional space onto a 2-dimensional canvas, and the patterns between stars are based on our unique vantage point rather than anything else, and the fact that most forces have no real bearing on such large distances makes me think otherwise.
Let us take the case of the 'Bermuda Triangle', supposedly a place where accidents constantly occurred, and many vessels 'disappeared without a trace', leading people to speak of everything from violent storms to alien abductions. But, according to wiki,
"Documented evidence indicates that a significant percentage of the incidents were inaccurately reported or embellished by later authors, and numerous official agencies have stated that the number and nature of disappearances in the region is similar to that in any other area of ocean."
For example,
"When the UK Channel 4 television program "The Bermuda Triangle" (c. 1992) was being produced by John Simmons of Geofilms for the Equinox series, the marine insurer Lloyd's of London was asked if an unusually large number of ships had sunk in the Bermuda Triangle area. Lloyd's of London determined that large numbers of ships had not sunk there. United States Coast Guard records confirm their conclusion. In fact, the number of supposed disappearances is relatively insignificant considering the number of ships and aircraft that pass through on a regular basis."
It is at the basis of a common misconception which is various much related to the placebo effect: too often the events and evidence to back up our claims is more readily available because we are actually making a concerted effort to document them. People will say 'my horoscope says that I should have a good day', and the positives are taken out of it, and when you are supposed to have a bad day, the situation is reversed. In Adam Curtis' documentary The Trap (available in full on youtube), he talks about the number of people who suddenly started to diagnose themselves for psychological trauma when all they were doing was feeling normal emotions. And then it becomes a downward spiral; the anxiety heightens the more we look for evidence that there is indeed something wrong, which further exacerbates the wrong that we see.
For me, I strongly believe that we make our own luck. Of course, fortune and misfortune will always smile (or frown) upon us, but the more opportunities and options we give ourselves to succeed, and the less we rely on superstition to take responsibility from us, the better off we are.
And, ultimately, the luckier we become.
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