Superstition

This past weekend, I executed a ritual I had put together with friends. Successfully (more on this in a subsequent post), but it was touch-and-go at times during the planning stages.

The event was long overdue. The last one I’d done was in 2008 and there wasn’t going to be one I could attend in the foreseeable future, so a friend and I organized our own: called around to find other people interested in participating, secured skilled specialists, searched for and vetted a venue, figured out how sleeping and food was going to work.

Oh how I loathe event planning.

Tried to swing it for this past May, but couldn’t get enough participants. The consensus was October would be better, so we postponed it until the 22nd.

But as the date approached, the person I had earmarked for leading the ritual, half the participants and more than half the support personnel had to cancel, some in the last 48 hours. Some because I didn’t follow through with them appropriately, others for their own very legitimate reasons — family crises, other obligations, financial hardship. They all most sincerely wished they could have been there.

If I were a superstitious person, I would have seen everything tanking — all the obstacles and stumbling blocks that put themselves in the way of doing this — as “Signs Not To Do The Thing” and folded the operation.

Fortunately, I’m not superstitious; I’m science-licious.

I apparently use the term ‘superstitious’ to mean something that others do not.

For most,  a ‘superstitious person’ is someone who is totally willing to allow for the reasons behind mysterious or surprising results to be ‘because God’, or ‘because spirits’, or ‘because fate’, or ‘because woo’.  The epithet is intended to be insulting, suggesting that anyone who believes that those forces are legitimate is not worth taking seriously.

Well, I am those things. That is, I am totally willing to allow for the reasons behind mysterious or surprising results to be, ‘because [any of those above choices]’ but I do not consider myself ‘superstitious’.

To me, a superstitious person has one additional requisite qualification: a superstitious person, having decided that the answer to ‘why’ is ‘because God’, then stops wondering about it. The superstitious person finds a comfortable answer that they think explains the behavior or pattern, and then becomes utterly incurious, and ceases to investigate the phenomenon. They become too willing to draw a trend line from only two points, and will not reevaluate their conclusion when new data that challenge it are presented.

A scientist does the opposite of these things.

And a lot of people in the science fields are, under my definition, superstitious af. My definition of ‘superstitious’ applies even when the [x] in ‘because [x]’ is a well-documented thought-to-be-proven causative force that has nothing to do with deities or woo. It’s just as problematic then, if not more so.

The pull I felt to do last week’s ritual was so great both hell and high water would have had to come for me to cancel the event. So despite the ‘signs’, we went forward with it anyway. Eight participants: The minimum critical mass.

It ended up being ritual-by-committee, with no MC. An extremely bare bones ceremony, with zero pomp. Basic. Sufficient. It was the right space, the right time, and a skeleton crew of the right people. And it went excellently well.

Thank God I’m not a superstitious person, or I would have missed out on a truly awesome experience.