wish a wish to wish wishes

Starlight, star bright

First star I see tonight

I wish I may

I wish I might

Have the wish I wish tonight

Make a wish.

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Then send this to 7,107 people in the 7,107 islands of the Philippines in ten seconds.

It’s weird how naïve people can be sometimes about wishes. I never really got it though. We get so many chances to wish according to the world: on the first star you see at dusk, when you see a shooting star or just pick any of the countless stars and wish upon one. We wish before blowing birthday candles, on wishing feathers, wishing wells, wishing fountains, wish bones… You can make a wish when a digital clock displays the same digits or when the digits displayed corresponds to your birthday and when you enter a catholic church for the first time. There are harder instances too: completing and attending all 9 days/nights of misa de gallo, going to 7 different churches on holy week, when you pray ten Our Fathers and Hail Mary’s and pray the rosary, when you send a irritating and pointless email to 10, 11, 12,13 people in 5 minutes who probably already received the same email you’d be sending them…

Aren’t wishes supposed to be as free as dreams? It’s funny because we make up these stupid and rather pointless consequences of when we could wish or not or when it would be granted or not. You can wish on a fallen eyelash that a friend picks up from you but it would only come true if you can guess which way it’s going: up or down. Same with the wishing feather, make sure you do not weigh it with a wish so big that it can’t carry it to the sky. You can wish on your birthday candles but it would only come true when you blow every single one out in one breath. Can anyone really come up with a study of which of these are effective and which are not?

Same thing with luck. I get at least one email or one text message every week about luck… send this to all of your friends to have good luck but if you don’t bad luck will follow you. If you break a mirror you would have seven years of bad luck aside from a mess to clean up. If you find a four leaf clover it would bring you luck but a five leafed one would be bad. If a black cat crosses your path, pick it up, it’s cute! … err, I mean, you would have bad luck on wherever your going. If you wear red on your birthday, you’d have good luck but it would be bad if you do on a funeral.

There’s so much more.

Obviously, I’m not a superstitious person but its amazing how much people rely and follow these unwritten and universally acknowledged “maybes”. It won’t hurt to believe, some people would tell me while throwing salt over their shoulder or trying to catch a rogue wishing feather. It’s not like you fully depend on your wish coming true or on your luck, you still try your best and work for what you have and pray for what you can achieve. And who am I to break their faith in the magical and colorful mysticism of world just because of cold, hard facts and boring logic. I guess it’s just the kid inside all of us struggling to break free. The kid that believed in Santa and flying reindeers and fairies (clap your hands if you believe in fairies!) that trusted the world completely. Maybe we all need to have that kid come out every once in a while to just smile and believe in the world, to believe for us that anything is possible and dreams can be reached and that good triumphs always over evil and that love conquers all. Maybe we need to break our systematic trance in a work day to stretch our arms out and try to catch that elusive wishing feather or pause in our hurried 15-minute lunch break meals to ask a friend to grab the other end of your chicken wishbone to see which of you can get a wish free. Or at the end of the day, weary and tired, we could try to seek out the first star we see and wish for anything, even the impossible. Who knows, it might happen…

Maybe we all need to let that child inside us to come out each time we feel weary or depressed or jaded and hopeless and just let that child we once were to keep believing for our adult selves. Who knows, the world may end up being a little less bleak and a lot more beautiful.

But I’m still not sending those emails.