Thursday! 2-35: Hang your Horseshoe
V2, I35
“But there are charms to secure happiness as well as charms to avert evil. In these I am a firm believer. I do not mean that I believe that a horseshoe hung up in the house will bring me good luck; I mean that if anybody does believe this, then the hanging up of his horseshoe will probably bring him good luck. For if you believe that you are going to be lucky, you go about your business with a smile, you take disaster with a smile, you start afresh with a smile. And to do that is to be in the way of happiness.”
— A. A. Milne, from “Superstition” in Not that It Matters.
This week’s Thursday comes via a trip down an internet rabbit hole which led me to the house of a certain Bear of Little Brain1 who led me to a gentle British author whose words about superstition and lucky charms you just read. I had intended to write about Things and how it was a comfort to Winnie when he brought a Thing from in his head into reality2. As happens from time to time, though, the Thing inside me was not quite as Thingish as I expected and I found myself in another part of Milne’s writing with quite a different Thing in front of me.
But, that’s how art works, isn’t it? Isn’t this the very process we’ve talked about over and again here in this cozy little place? You start working on one thing only to find out what you’re really making is something quite different. Often times it’s better as well, because it’s something you’ve had slowly cooking in your pot of creative ideas and ruminations for a while, only it wasn’t ready. When you dipped in your ladle, though, for something to serve up, it was ready. Surprise!
That’s one of the weird but also wonderful things about creativity. You can never be entirely certain about what you will get when you begin. Like in the Pooh quote I didn’t use, the Thing you set out to make isn’t quite the Thing you end up making. Your creativity does get a say, along with your will and your intentions. We often see that as disconcerting but I don’t think it is. Once you realize that’s how creativity works, you can learn to have a lot of fun with it. You get the joy of discovery before anyone else does and how cool is that?3
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But that’s not quite where I want to go with Thursday! this week, at least not where I want mostly to go. Pooh Bear gave me a fine beginning, but there is more to the Thing I’d like to share with you and it involves horseshoes and luck and positivity bias.
Psychologists have a term for the habit some folks have of seeing the best in every thing that comes their way: Pollyanna Syndrome. It’s named for the main character in a series of books written in the early 1900’s who played what she called “the glad game”. She looked for the good in everything she encountered — people, events, random happenings, you name it. Normally, a positivity bias like this is good for people. You can use a positive outlook to intentionally push back against your own negativity bias. An event doesn’t have to be bad from the jump; it can be good. People who take that to an extreme — those who see good in everything, even when there is no evident good and even when doing so blinds them to hazards and dangers — can hurt themselves and people around them. They can run their lives into any number of trouble spots because they simply ignored a bad thing that was manageable but grew out of control.
I started with the extreme because, well, that’s a bit where we like to go. If I had started by saying “you know, you can get along each day pretty well if you expect good outcomes instead of bad ones” you could easily come back with “Yeah, Pollyanna? Being all upbeat all the time isn’t such a good thing, you know. What happens when you ignore all the bad stuff? Nothing I tell you! Good day”. And you’d have a good point.
That’s where Milne’s quote comes in. He’s really talking about a daily positivity bias, but not a blind nor ignorant one. We all believe in luck, just a little bit, even those of us who believe in an Almighty God whose take a hand in all of our daily affairs. We all believe that little things can break one way or the other — for us or against us, toward a win or a loss. The basketball bounces off the rim a couple times and into the net. The baseball takes a crazy hop off a rock in the infield and bounces through the first baseman’s legs for an error. The person making your sub puts an extra piece of turkey on the sub today. You find a fiver in the pocket of your pants just at the moment you thought about grabbing an iced coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts. All that rings up as bits of luck in our heads and we tend to pay more attention to the bits of luck that best match our state of mind in any given day. If we’re having a bad day, or are given to melancholy, we remember the bad bounces and the accidental spills. We sigh and say “Well, isn’t that just how it is for me?”
Except that isn’t how it is. A.A. Milne nailed the mindset. A man who believes in luck hangs a horseshoe because he believes it’ll tilt the bounces his way even though we all know it won’t. That’s not how luck works. Charms aren’t real in that way. But the charm is very real in a different way. It primes the man to see the good bounces more than the bad ones plus it sets him up to see the bad breaks as “win some lose some” events or (and this is the VERY cool part) as not bad at all!
Imagine the man who hung the horseshoe. He heads, spills coffee on his shirt, and has to go change. It puts him a few minutes behind and he hits the road to work a little late. He sees an accident ahead of him and says “Wow. Imagine if I hadn’t spilled that coffee!” Then, he gets to work and one of his co-workers tells him his shirt looks cool. Whoa! He wasn’t even going to wear it, but there he is, looking cool! He takes that boost of confidence into the morning meeting and, instead of shrinking back and grumbling about how rushed he’s felt this morning, he leans in and drops a suggestion that’s been on his mind. BOOM! Boss digs it. Wants to hear more. See how this can snowball?
Same goes for us creative folks. We make stuff and release stuff and pray someone will love something, anything, we make. We can’t control that part of things. Marketing, mostly, is luck and brute force. Some authors hit on their very first book and some write for decades before a fair-sized audience discovers them. Kay Ryan, who was United States Poet Laureate from 2008-2010, self-published her first book of poetry in 1983 (!!), didn’t build much of an audience for herself until the mid-1990s, and didn’t get discovered nationally until 2004. On the other hand, Stephenie Meyer’s first novel got her a three-book deal and became a monster franchise. You can’t know how the world will receive anything you create. All you can do is create and release and create and release and on and on because you’re an artist and that’s what artists do.
But you can also hang that horseshoe. Luck isn’t real, but maybe showing up brings you more chances. More chances mean more chances to succeed, to have the lightning strike, to have the right eyes see your work at the right time. You hang the horseshoe and maybe you take bolder steps. Perhaps you send your manuscript to an agent or publisher you thought “beyond you”. Maybe you look at all the small poetry journals begging for submissions who can’t pay anything but they have readers and more readers mean more chances for your poems to find people who’ll love them. Maybe you keep on taking steps, with a smile, because the good is going to find you — today or tomorrow or on tomorrow’s tomorrow. Who can say? You don’t control that. You hung the horseshoe. It’s there. You did your part. Now you make your art and let the chances come.
It can’t guarantee your success but it can secure you some happiness, and isn’t that a fine enough thing? Hang the horseshoe, okay? Take that Thing inside you, make something of it, and let people see it. Smile because, hey, you just made a cool thing. Who else could do that like you did? No one. Not another soul on Earth. That’s yours. You can be truly happy about that.
I know because the horseshoe said so.
Various Things I Wrote Last Week
I didn’t exactly write this poem last week, but I re-posted it to a certain account on a certain social media platform *sneakyeyesemoji*. You probably didn’t see it, but it’s here now!
And then there’s this. Most of me is sorry to inflict this on you but a small part of me is not even a little bit apologetic. Not even for that last line.
May I make an admission here? I love Winnie the Pooh. I’ve loved Pooh Bear since I was a very small child and my Mom or Sterling Holloway would read me the stories. Still, today, the voice of Pooh is Mr. Holloway. Perhaps one week, I’ll devote all of Thursday! to my love for that lovely little bear. If it’s of interest, of course.
Oxford Reference, Quote 6. You’ll know it when you see it.
Very cool.