Stupidstition

Now that you are all adequately caught up on my affinity for sports, I’ve decided to give you some more reading entertainment regarding sporting activities. As you can see from today’s title, it’s stupid superstition. Superstition in sports, no way right! Even the least informed sports watcher or aficionado knows all about the superstitions when it comes to sports. Players will just about do anything to keep their personal stupidstitions alive and well. It could be a pair of socks, underwear, or a lucky glove. Special trinkets, food, or even specific times of doing things can be involved. ANYTHING can become a stupidstition. We mainly see this in sports and athletics because there is a certain amount of “luck” involved in their arena of competition. If the luck is on your side and you follow through on your stupidstitions, you are more likely to receive the positive benefit of this so-called luck. However, if you fail to “honor” your trinkets or special clothing or whatever, “bad luck” is most certainly on the way!

Ever watch the movie “Bull Durham?” I’m sure if you have, you remember the roles of stupidstition there. Baseball and its players are one of the largest gatherings of people “believing” in superstition. We hear about curses all the time whether it is the Chicago Cubs or the Boston Red Sox or the Chicago White Sox. Every team has some sort of past bad luck associated with a curse or superstition. That’s part of the folklore of such a great pastime. It adds to the cache of the sport. It brings a sense to the game that something out there truly cares about who wins or loses. The Cubs can’t win the World Series, they are born to lose. Statistics and many June swoons over the years have only added to the knowledge this is true right? What about those Boston Red Sox? They broke their curse twice in the last few years. I guess their players found some way to satisfy the ghosts of Babe Ruth’s past.

Name a sport and there will be stupidstitions associated with it. Players rely on the luck factor and they have to appease the winds of tradition. However, are athletes the only people who believe these silly stupidstitions exist? Of course not. How many people have a lucky tie? How many people have a lucky pair of underwear? How many people have a lucky “insert item here?” Do people do things differently when something important comes up? Do they have certain superstitions when it comes to sales meetings, first dates, or special events? Sure, I can place a good bet that the majority of people out there have at least one stupidstition in their life. It could be something simple or something major, but the fact is, you are focusing on something out of your control and hoping that if you satisfy the needs of this sentient owner of luck, things will fall on your side when needed. You believe you can bring luck to your side. With luck AND skill on your side, how can we lose right?

Think about it just a little bit. Sure, superstitions are stupid, but we still have them. Why? Most of the time, we truly believe there was something that happened that affected our performance or outcome. On the way to your job interview, you forgot to wear the lucky tie. We all know that’s why the interview didn’t go well. That sales meeting flopped because you failed to eat the “special” breakfast for that day. You didn’t get that promotion because you didn’t wear your tried and true lucky underwear that day. The first date with the girl you’ve had your eye on failed miserably because you failed to wear your lucky suit. I’m sure you get the idea. Superstitions are created and followed because of one thing, failure. Failure created the superstition and we follow the superstition to keep failure from happening again. That is the basic concept here.

Sports teams and athletes focus upon superstition more than the rest of us and publicly display them because they truly believe failure can be averted if they satisfy the requirements of the stupidstition. Your everyday, normal person also falls into this category. Failure haunts our pasts and we try and rationalize why some things work and some do not. We analyze the situations that work against those that don’t and find the differences. Something in the differences must be what created the failure right? Everything was the same that day except I forgot to wear the special black socks. That must be it. The black socks are now the lucky socks. Our team just lost 3 in a row, what did we do different than when we won 3 straight? We must have lost because we didn’t practice at exactly noon each day. We are readily looking for something to place blame upon because of our failures. Stupidstition serves this purpose and it does it very well. It’s a perfect institution to blame. It’s much better than blaming ourselves or realizing that maybe it WAS something we did to create failure.

Losing the promotion to superstition is much easier than focusing upon your own strengths and weaknesses. Not getting the girl is better given to crappy wardrobe than failure of chemistry. Failure to land the job is easier to accept if you don’t have to accept the blame upon yourself. The majority of the time, failure is the culprit and the creator of superstition. It accepts blame and it actually creates an aura around itself. Superstitions grow throughout time. We readily place all failure at the feet of stupidstition but we NEVER allow for the rare anomaly of success to detract from it. Success even in the face of failing at superstition, it must be a fluke, it’ll never happen again. I mean, the light shines on a dog’s…

So here we are at the end of the article and it really wasn’t about sports at all was it? Stupidstition is just a metaphor for failure in our lives. It’s much easier to live life placing blame on something that is a wisp of our imagination. It draws and feeds upon our desires to succeed. The power of the stupidstition in your life depends on just how much you believe “luck” affects your life. If you feel life happens to you, then stupidstition probably plays a large part in your life. However, if you believe life is what you make it then stupidstition is more than likely in the backseat and rarely sees the light of day. Failure in our lives is guaranteed. We can choose to accept it and move forward trying to correct what was done wrong or we can focus upon our “bad” luck and place the blame for failure on superstition. Of course I know it’s easier to live without acceptance of failure, but who said living life was easy? Stop worrying about the luck of life and focus upon the living of life.