You won’t believe it and strange as it sounds Extraordinary magic follows you around And the camera can’t catch it You won’t see it in the mirror If I say look behind you you turn around, it disappears
But I see it, I see it I swear I do I see extraordinary magic in you
-Extraordinary Magic by Ben Rector
Most people think that magic doesn’t exist. They understand, like any enlightened member of the human race, that even though it looks like the magician is making it look like the card is vanishing into thin air, all you have to do is pull up his sleeve a quarter inch. There you’ll see what your mind understood — even if your heart still wanted it to be otherwise — that it was nothing more than a flip of the wrist. The card was really there all along.
Still, despite this commonly held view, the more I learn about the world, the universe, our entire existence within this thin wisp of time, the more I can’t help but think that magic still exists. That there are things that defy our explanations. That there is some push and pull in the universe that brings people together in ways that seem beyond coincidence. That 1+1 doesn’t always equal 2.
The more we learn about the universe, for example, the more we’ve been able to explain natural phenomenon, the more we’ve been able to calculate has only shown us just how much is beyond our calculations:
Gravity pulls objects in together closer and closer in orbit, until in some instances those objects get sucked in so close to one other that the force actually expels one object and flings it at extremely fast speed across the great expanse.
Matter cannot be created or destroyed, a principle that we’ve held to be true for centuries. Until we start looking down into the microscopic level and discover a subatomic particle, the same exact subatomic particle, that can exist in two places at the same time.
I know. There are scientific explanations for this, too.
But isn’t it just a little bit more exciting…and humbling…to think of it as something else. Like magic. Something that reminds us that we don’t really know everything…that we can’t know everything…that we don’t have to know everything. Something that reminds us that we are finite, frail, infinitesimal. And yet still somehow full of beauty, wonder and meaning.
I know magic exists because I’ve seen it.
If I told you where to look for it, by the time you turned around it would be gone.
Or you’d tell me just to look a little bit closer. “See,” you’d say, “that’s where he tucked the card away.”
But I still believe in it.
And the magic I’ve seen is not the kind with planets being orbitally flung across the galaxy or imploding stars or observing subatomic particles. It’s ordinary magic.
It’s the magic I feel when I see my five year-old niece crinkles up her nose whenever I see her. Or when my nephew asks me with his rising boyish lilt if “Uncle Chris can we play Legos?”
It’s the magic I saw when I first dared to hold the earth in my hands as I tilled it and turned it over and dug into it to plant seeds in the hopes of growing a garden. And how those first tiny seeds shot up through the worn earth, without any help or skill on my part.
We’re surrounded by magic. A thousand perfectly explainable miracles happening every day around us. We know what’s happening, at least scientifically, but it is still a wonder.
The little magic of our bodies’ ability to grow, to change, to heal, even after years of misuse.
The little magic of bringing life into this world, even after trying and trying and trying. It happens around the world hundreds and hundreds of times over every day. And yet it still has the power to completely shift the entire center of your universe.
Or the magic it takes to find, even at the age of 34, that life still is one big adventure. You may have just stop going down the paths less traveled — the ones filled with danger and surprise and hurt and the unknown — and settled for the rote, the routine, the regular.
And so this is me. At 34. Still trying to find the magic.
This is me trying to get over imposter syndrome and share more of the what, the why and the how of finding ordinary magic in my life — in the hopes that it helps you find some magic too.
This is me trying to come to terms with the fact that we do wake up every single morning and have to start the long, languishing work of rolling the boulder back up that daunting hill. And it will surely fall right back down to where we started with it. But oh, what a hell of a ride is it on the way back down!
This is me saying that I don’t think we ever lose our sense of childlike wonder, not really. I think we just lose our desire to seek out things to wonder about.
Ya know…like magic. Ordinary, magic.
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