Two Magpies
I am not by inclination superstitious. I like to think of myself as a rational child of the Enlightenment. The number ‘13’ holds no fears for me. I understand that walking under ladders is not unlucky, though it may increase the chance of having something dropped on one from above. I know that opening umbrellas indoors does not bring bad luck, but may cause domestic damage in the hands of a clumsy person.
And yet, there are some habits of thought out of which I found it hard to break. I still wear a St. Christopher on a silver chain around my neck, perhaps less as a token of good luck than as a reminder of a childhood-learnt family norm. And I still have a Pavlovian response to the sight of a magpie that children of the 70s will likely find familiar. The ITV tea-time childrens’ programme ‘Magpie’ had the ear-worm-like theme tune that lasts through the ages, so that the visual stimulus of a magpie prompts the cognitive response of ‘One for sorrow, Two for joy.’
Of course, by definition, one usually sees one magpie on its own. Even if it is not alone, one may see the single specimen first, before noticing the companion bird. If one has slipped into a glass half full way of thinking – negative automatic thoughts, my cognitive behavioural therapist calls it – that first sighting prompts that initial ‘one for sorrow’ and little else but a search for the likely source of said sorrow. Such has been my wont in recent years.
One aspect of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is the idea of identifying and adapting negative automatic thoughts (NATs). I have been consciously trying to do this. One such NAT is ‘black and white thinking’, the idea that a certain circumstance is either good or bad (most likely, bad), that life has no grey areas; ‘one for sorrow, two for joy’.
I now recognise my response for what it is, a reflex, a negative automatic thought, and I try to adapt it. I may see only one magpie, but that does not mean there is not another nearby. It does not mean unalloyed sorrow. More likely it means I am not looking from the correct angle. The world is not black and white. The world is not one, nor two magpies.
