I am not sure about good luck but bad luck comes in threes. At least if I am having a run of bad luck I hope it will end at three. After three disasters I suppose our ancient forebears would start to think about sacrificing a virgin—male or female depending on their proclivities—to appease whatever gods they were worshiping at the time.
Right at the outset I have to say I am not a great believer in luck. Luck and superstition are two sides of the same coin, and the thought of giving up my free will to the willy-nilly nature of a universe I cannot control gives me no comfort. My approach is to be aware of my environment and ready to accept what comes my way. What is the saying, luck favors a prepared mind.
But I admit I have been the recipient of dumb luck even as I deny belief in it. I suppose fate, karma or kismet might be alternative terms, but these have other implications associated with them. No, luck is just luck. No substitution needed.
Why does bad luck come in threes? Three is just a prime number divisible by one and itself. It could be that three has a personality like in 6-6-6 for the devil or 9-1-1 for an emergency. I was raised with the Holy Trinity: The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost. The Hindu religion has the Trimurti: Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva, and their wives the Tridevi: Saraswati, Lakshmi and Parvati.
A minor chord has three notes: a root, a minor third and a perfect fifth. The Japanese haiku favors three lines to describe the universe. And of course there are the supposed trivial numbers we live with so intimately that we forget their existence: area codes, the three numbers of our high school locker’s combination lock, and our social security and phone numbers that split into three segments.
There must be something that makes us pick three. Maybe our collective psyche has decided that groupings of three are just more interesting and thus easier to remember.
There are many Rules of Three from mathematics, to medicine, literature, statistics, etc., etc. And now that I think of it, good luck weighs in here too: the third time’s a charm. But this assumes you have failed twice before, so it is not altogether an uplifting story.
Last summer while cruising on the Great Lakes two of our fellow travelers and us had a series of mishaps. You guessed it, three. Due to the other side of the coin—superstition—I have been cautioned against uttering the precise details in print. I will respect this wish. After the third mishap we three invoked the rule of three and it held true until we all arrived safely home.
Where do I go from here? Is this story about the number three or about luck, maybe neither. It is a point to jump off into a stream of consciousness. After all our life is made up of action and consequences. If they are grouped in three, so be it. If they are not, so what. Superstition, astrology, horoscopes and soon video poker should not bind our lives. They limit the self.
As a young man I consulted the I Ching’s tripartite view of the world thinking it a benign tool. My mistake was treating it as a philosophical toy. Study that could have gone into something productive went into an endeavor that hindered my growth for many years. It was as if I had time traveled and altered history, my history. Was its prediction inevitable, I doubt it. Could I have ignored it, certainly. Could I forget it, never!
It is the coin’s double sided nature again. Now I know to stay rooted in the irrefutable laws of the physical world and leave parapsychology to the psychic. Bad luck and good will come no matter, in ones or twos or threes. We live in an ever-expanding universe, take advantage of it. Stand in the clear frigid night and sense the movement of the cosmos. Revel in its vastness and beauty. Use the time to describe the world, in three lines:
Freezing nights upon us —
Hiroshije’s prints
Expand on reality.
January 2012
