Lucky Me, I Don’t Believe In Luck
See a pin and pick it up,
All the day you’ll have good luck.
See a pin and let it lay,
Bad luck you’ll have all the day.
I learnt this rhyme when I was eight. And I can remember very vividly how my teacher was teaching it to us in class. It seemed only yesterday. But how often in life do you see a pin as you walk? Today, I just did. After all these years. It was just two minutes ago – I was walking up the stairs and there, on a step, was a pin with a bright green head. I picked it up. And instantaneously, my mind started singing:
See a pin and pick it up, How often in life do you see a pin? … and pick it up? I think in my whole life, this is one rare instance. Perhaps I’ll have good luck for the rest of the day! But will I have bad luck if I had let the pin lay? Who composed this rhyme anyway? Was the person serious about its content? How can the picking up of a pin bring good luck? Many sayings about luck are just like this one, aren’t they? For example, if you walk under a ladder, or a black cat crosses your path, you’ll have bad luck. Or, worse still, if you break a mirror, you’ll have seven years of it! How much of these are true? Luck. What is it? Is it just another way of looking at the sequence of events happening in your life? To me, it is. And it isn’t my way. To me, there is no such thing as luck. There is cause-and-effect, there is God’s will and God’s timing – no luck. Lucky me, I don’t have to worry about walking near cats, or breaking mirrors. Today, I picked up a pin but nothing else particularly lucky has occurred to me since I started writing this article. This article was written on 11th May 1999. Posted here on 22nd June 1999.
All the day you’ll have good luck.
See a pin and let it lay,
Bad luck you’ll have all the day.