Yesterday, walking to the mailbox, a blue bird darted from the flower bushes flying past so close, I felt the air shift.
At least I think it was a bluebird.
It happened so fast, I’m not sure what flew by. But the blur was colorful, blue-ish, and I felt lucky. My solar plexus swirled and the sun beamed brighter, an intense moment beyond the mere adrenaline rush of being startled. I had just seen a bird I never see and that’s lucky because, well, bluebirds mean luck.
You’ve probably heard that before.
The type of luck you’ll have is different depending on whom you consult.
Luck, like most intangible donors, reigns from a subjective stance.
Technically, (no bird species can make blue from pigments, it’s all light waves interacting with feathers and keratin) but in our world, as we know it, blue exists. But .
Rare is valuable.
Perhaps that’s why a bluebird crossing your path made its way into mythical status.
As I pondered my good fortune at the mailbox, I felt lucky, even if it wasn’t really a bluebird. True or not, I was already reaping the benefits.
Perhaps just thinking the bluebird bestowed its good luck mojo on me makes me lucky. Like, maybe luck has nothing to do with it. That just believing it touched me, I was, in fact, touched.
And I’ve been lucky.
For instance, in 2012 when Ron and I were packing to move my son Shaun out of his college apartment. The mattress wouldn’t budge around a corner and when it finally broke free, catapulted me, derrière first through a four-inch old-fashioned, non-tempered glass coffee table. I sat on the floor, in the middle of the table frame, bent in a “V” like a sky-bound performance diver when I should have died, or at least had my spine cut or my body slashed by splintering glass.
I waited for pain, for trickling of blood, for sensation to zap me out of shock, but none came. I had only sliced my ring finger. From top to bottom, half of it splayed open lengthwise, right down the length of it. One finger of an entire body.
It didn’t even hurt.
Less than ten minutes of arriving at the emergency room, the physician stitched my finger all the way up, around, and back down again. Would I lose my finger? The one for my precious wedding ring? We’ll just have to wait and see, he said. No guarantees. I went to wound care every single day after for two weeks and today, I not only have my finger, and feeling, you can barely see a scar. The nurse told me I was “lucky,” that many people would have lost their finger.
There was also the time I had my perforated ear drum replaced because of significant hearing loss and the doctors found a cholesteatoma, a stealth but steadfast, serious condition, that had disintegrated two of my three inner ear bones and I was “thaaaaaat” close to losing the third and being deaf forever.
Had we not found it, it would have eventually eaten away at the bones in my brain causing certain catastrophe!
My doctor confirms that I am not being dramatic when I say this for she said it first, the difference being she used periods and I use exclamations.
Today, with two prosthetic ear bones (you can’t have three since there would be nothing to anchor to), I hear significantly better than I have in the last 20 years. I now monitor my left ear’s hearing and health, which will, in time, succumb in the same manner. This time we will catch it before it causes so much damage.
How lucky am I?
I feel lucky. My ordinary life feels extraordinarily lucky.
Luck is believing you’re lucky.”
—Tennessee Williams
Psychologist Dr. Richard Wiseman (who we must assume to be—ahem—a wise man, one who had a bit of luck himself in the surname game) agrees.
Dr. Wiseman writes in that being a lucky person is just a matter of perspective. He studied people who were lucky and not lucky over eight years and found that those who adjusted their attitudes, and thus their actions increased their happiness, confidence, and success.
He says that believing you’re lucky makes you try harder because you know there’s a good outcome. Those who don’t believe they are lucky quit before they can find success because they don’t believe they will find it.
So, I’ll believe a bluebird blessed me. I’ll believe it gave me good luck by its sheer presence.
Because believing I’m lucky makes me lucky.
Do you feel lucky?
Bluebird image credit: Jalynn from Pixabay