Old Wive’s Tales
What We Think
Did you ever go around cursing your bad luck? Or God? Just because things are not looking up, things are not looking your way, does your potty language intrude? That’s what my mother used to call our bad language.
Does it seem sometimes the world does not seem a benevolent place to you? You see things as me and them. It’s you against the world. Or is it you against God? When was the last time you prayed? For that matter, when was the last time God answered a prayer? What if you are an atheist? What if you don’t even believe in God?
There are lots of wars going on all over the world. Or do you live in the middle of a city that’s gone to pot? There is crime everywhere. How could any of us feel safe? What about the terrible weather that we can now call climate change? When is it going to end?
How, in the midst of a world going to shit, are you supposed to feel useful and optimistic?
Do you look for retaliatory moves from the universe in response to whining and crying?
I used to be extra cautious about stepping on the lines on any sidewalk for fear I would break my mother’s back. Remember the rhyme?
Step on a crack, break your mother’s back!
Or how about when people would throw salt over their shoulders? My mother had this thing about not touching the saltshaker when she was passing it to somebody else at the table. We would reach out for it, and she would draw her arm back sharply and say, “No, let me put it down, or we will have a fight.” That was weird. I only stopped doing that after I had been married for a while. My husband thought it was ridiculous. I wasn’t too sure, at least for the first couple of years that we were married. Finally, I let that whopper go.
Certainly, walking under ladders is a common enough thing to invite bad luck, especially if there is a painter with a can of paint up at the top of the ladder.
I can understand how kids would pick up what they learned from their parents and hold those beliefs close. One would hope that if those beliefs were twisted, the kid would let them go at some point in their mid to late twenties and find a better way in the world. One would hope. Maybe that one is tough. I just deleted the part I wrote about Republicans.
Here’s a good one that relates to me being a psychic channel. You know that old saying not to think ill of the dead? Somebody in Spirit just said, “Because we can hear you!!”
So, how do you get over all that? How can you turn a history of ducking for fear of retaliation into a calm and peace-filled day of writing?
You deliberately turn your face into the sun. Figuratively. I can’t do it right now because it’s too early, and the sun hasn’t come up yet.
So, figuratively, turn your attitude to a bright and sunny place. Say untruthful things like, “I am in a good mood” or “I am optimistic.” If you say them often enough, who knows? You might start to believe them.
Speaking of affirmations. Do not put negative words into an affirmation. Your child-like brain does not hear the word No or the word Not. So, if you were to say, “I do not smoke” or “I am a non-smoker,” as your affirmation, the brain hears, instead, “I do smoke” and “I am a smoker.” The better affirmation is, “I am smoke-free.”
It takes a long time to cure yourself of the idea of the universe or God being retaliatory. It takes years to unlearn yourself of ideas that just thinking of something wicked or wrong is going to make it happen. That flies in the face of the idea that thinking good things will also affect the final outcome.
I don’t have the answers here. Everybody either comes to their own conclusions or learns to dance around fate. But I have a suspicion. I think it has to do with trust.
Suppose you can trust that everything is going to be okay. That everything is going to turn out in the end, okay.
As I said, it’s a suspicion. It’s a theory. I suppose if you were a woman in the 1500s, you would say yes, trusting like that was a good thing and that it did work out. It just took 523 years. We’re not there yet, but it’s getting better.