Last night was not a good night. David spent the whole night literally writhing in pain. Early this morning we went to the ER in Waimea and he was diagnosed with an inner ear infection. He now has antibiotics, pain meds and something for his vertigo. And, at the moment it looks like he will be safe to fly home on Monday.
I know I had nothing to do with his ear infection, but I can’t help that nagging feeling that I brought this on myself. I tempted fate and David got slapped in the face, er, ear. It is all well and good to enjoy being in paradise but I probably should have kept it to myself. Some superstitions just die hard.
As a former psych major, I also know how superstitions work. That we only remember that which confirms a superstition, either good or bad. That lucky shirt? How many times have you written off losses that happened while wearing that shirt? Declaring that they somehow didn’t count. And the wins? Those are clearly the result of wearing that shirt, not at all attributable to outside factors, right?
One of my favorite lines from Star Wars is after Luke has taken out his first TIE fighter and Han Solo tells him “that’s great kid, now don’t get cocky.” Luke, being both an invincible teenager and endowed with the force totally ignores Han’s advice. He spends the rest of the movie and the rest of the trilogy (we won’t discuss I, II and III) being cocky as hell. Nevertheless, it is a line that has always stuck with me. I use it to remind myself of the dangers of hubris.
Now hubris and superstition are two different things, but in my mind they have always been related. They are both somewhat magical and yet fully within my control. Both are based on unfounded beliefs that can have a great deal of influence on how a person acts. The biggest difference between them being that in one case the magic is attributed to oneself and the other attributes the magic to outside forces. And for me the bottom line is that I just don’t believe in magic. Regardless of how inexplicable the phenomenon or experience.
That is not to say that I don’t believe in things I can’t prove or disprove. I just attribute them to my imagination instead of magic. For example, I like to imagine that David’s grandparents are together again in some place unknown to the living. I find it comforting to think of them continuing their relationship of 68+ years. And as cool as I think science is, I feel no compulsion to understand how everything works. If we don’t understand the mechanism for something, I am perfectly content to make something up or simply letting it remain a mystery.