I have many small superstitious type habits.
Oh also, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and I hope you and your’s
are all safe, happy, and healthy.
OCD-ish, I guess but undiagnosed and probably just a result of my mother being not just superstitious but superduperstitious.
Case in point…
My mother will not use scissors on a Sunday.
When she used to watch our boys overnight and when the need to use scissors arose on the Sunday morning, she’d get one of the kids to do it instead.
I’ve never been able to determine if there was some sort of cosmic loophole that allowed this or she felt the boys were young enough they still had a lifetime ahead of them in which to remedy any bad luck.
I think the former but I’m not sure.
A number of years ago we were going through some terrible times and checking the mail meant opening up the mailbox to reveal yet more bad news.
I developed this habit where I would twirl my key ring with the mailbox key on it three times. Each time had to be a perfect and complete revolution.
If it failed to be perfect and complete, I would start again. That sometimes meant that I would have to stand outside of the vestibule where our mailbox was and keep doing it until I got it ‘right’.
Once satisfied with appeasing the mailbox key gods, I would proceed to opening the mailbox and if there was no bad news within, credit my supernatural twirling.
This is dumb.
I know this is dumb.
However, I’ve kept doing it ever since. Though I am much more lenient on what is considered perfect and complete because… well, I’m old and tired and I have couches to lie down on.
However, after about two years of this mad twirling, I got tired of the nonsense but instead of dropping the nonsensical habit like a sane person decided I would add a ritual.
Dumber.
But also good.
I realized that I was stressing myself out expecting bad things when I went to fetch the mail.
I thought, if there’s a fifty-fifty chance there’s going to be something bad why not expect good things?
I FORCED myself to adopt this new outlook.
It wasn’t easy. It FELT forced at first but…
Then I noticed my stress dissipating when I’d check the mail.
I’d still get bad news occasionally, but I’d also occasionally get good news.
Same odds as before except now I wasn’t a ball of dread.
I’m not saying I manifested good things, but I am saying we’re all superstitious weirdos who sometimes mistakenly think the Universe is out to get us.
Know this… the Universe doesn’t care enough about you to send you mean mail.
So live happy, deal with the bad if it comes but… expect good things.
You deserve them.
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No OCD here but when I start into my worry mode I remind myself of all the things I have spent time worrying about that haven’t happened. When I was a kid I would actively wish for the opposite of what I wanted so that I could be “disappointed “ by getting what I really wanted. I must have felt the gods were particularly interested in thwarting me . I slaughter that political parties woo me to join them. Do they not know that my vote is the kiss of death?
Have a wonderful Christmas and New Year with your friends and family.
Was your mother Irish then ? Here’s a Xmas poem for you.
PRECIOUS
He gave me a spruce lap desk
for writing in bed that Christmas.
It was rubbed into fragrance with oil of almond
and to lift the slanted top was to fall
into reveries with pens and the child’s
delight in things unused. But it lay heavily
against my knees, as if a lid had closed
down on me. It saddened him, I know, to see
how seldom I used it. Some gifts are sent
only to haunt. Now he’s gone
how lightly it rests the length of my thighs, and
lightly does my pen move the heavy words
under the downcast lids.
Tess Gallagher 1991