I do not believe in the supernatural, magic, ghosts or anything like that. However, I can be very superstitious about tempting fate and won’t make jokes or flippant remarks that could be interpretted as such.

For example, my partner made a dark joke about how she’d rather have cancer than such and such. I begged her not to say such things, not because the thought of her having cancer upset me (although it did), but because it feels as if saying stuff like that could make it happen.

  • Apytele@sh.itjust.works
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    13 hours ago

    Oh I’m superstitious about a great many things but I try to make it as useful as possible by being the most superstitious about not practicing regular gratitude. So for instance I’ll “wish” or “bless” someone with something like “a boring shift” because that’s the kind of thing it’s important to remember to be grateful for. Or instead of saying it’s “quiet” (a common bad-luck superstition in healthcare), I’ll comment that “I have been blessed with a good night so far.”

    A core component of my spirituality that I’ve reflected on lately is that regardless of what I do or don’t believe cosmologically, spirituality and religion offer a huge amount of emotional / psychological tools that have stood the test of time and appeared across multiple religions in various forms due to sheer usefulness. These include things like community and regular gratitude and mindfulness practices.

    They absolutely can and have been analyzed and implemented in other ways, but that requires a lot of research and very careful coordination of a lot of individual components. Meanwhile I’ve found a remarkable amount of success emotionally and psychologically in connecting with a faith community that has all those things built in and which has a LOT of other people who are doing the same thing to support me sticking with it.