The Ability to Sense Magic in the Everyday
One of the things [Older] (age 10) received in a recent bag of prizes was a deck of tiny playing cards. The other morning while I was getting ready for work, he and [Younger] (age 9) invented a game to play with them. I don't know details, but it involved math and gambling with pretend money. At one point they went into the other room and I overheard something along the lines of:
"So how can I get more money so I can play again?"
"Um . . . you could get a job."
"Okay . . . what jobs are available?"
And they went on to play through that scenario, with [Older] as "game master" and [Younger] as the player, doing "work" to earn "money." So that they could end up back on the floor playing another round of cards.
A couple of years ago I really enjoyed reading Katherine May's book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. I just finished her new title, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age. While I didn't enjoy it as much as Wintering, it's still worth capturing here, as it's about a topic I love.
My review:
This is a nice collection of short meditations on different ways May has battled her post-pandemic anxiety by seeking small moments of wonder in her life. Of encouraging her sense of connectedness to the world around her and enchantment with it. It's a wonderful topic and she writes beautifully, though her words didn't create within me a sense of connection and wonder as tangibly as I might have liked.
A few excerpts:
Enchantment is small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory. It relies on small doses of awe, almost homeopathic: those quiet traces of fascination that are found only when we look for them. It is the sense that we are joined together in one continuous thread of existence with the elements constituting this earth, and that there is a potency trapped in this interconnection, a tingle on the border of our perception. It is the forgotten seam in our geology, the elusive particle that binds our unstable matter: the ability to sense magic in the everyday, to channel it through our minds and bodies, to be sustained by it.Without it, I feel I am lacking some essential nutrient, some vitamin found only when you go digging in your own soil.-----That is what I am searching for: the chance to merge into the wild drift of the world, to feel overcome, to enter into its weft so completely that sometimes I can forget myself.-----Every single thing I must do—any hint of a demand—grinds against me. I resent it all. I want to be left, quietly, alone. I don’t know what I’d do in that time should I ever achieve that perfect aloneness. I like to think I would read, but in truth I would probably sleep. I don’t have the attention for reading. I don’t have the attention for anything, really. My brain feels entirely separate from me. It is empty, but it also cannot take any more in. It seems that it’s a useless organ, endlessly refusing to notice what I want it to notice. It will not engage. It just glances off everything, a pale beam.-----We are more moth than we know: small, frustrated, capable of only tickling a world that we wish would feel our heft. We share that attraction towards the brightest object in our field of view, an equal fascination with candles and conflagrations. We sense the danger, but we can’t look away. In fact we are drawn to circle it endlessly, getting closer and closer until it consumes us. Even when we think the sky might be falling, we stay to watch. It is elemental to us, this alertness, this panicked, flitting attention.Fire is the shadow side of enchantment, the dark, gleaming sorcery from which we can’t tear our gaze. It shows us the wild danger that still resides in nature, the power it retains to devour and destroy. It is impolite, contagious, capable of catching from house to house while we stand helpless. It licks our palms like a moth in cupped hands.We have not understood this earth’s full potency until we have recognized fire.-----Play is serious. Play is absolute. Play is the complete absorption in something that doesn’t matter to the external world, but which matters completely to you. It’s an immersion in your own interests that becomes a feeling in itself, a potent emotion. Play is a disappearance into a space of our choosing, invisible to those outside the game. It is the pursuit of pure flow, a sandbox mind in which we can test new thoughts, new selves. It’s a form of symbolic living, a way to transpose one reality onto another and mine it for meaning. Play is a form of enchantment.-----I think I’m beginning to understand that the quest is the point. Our sense of enchantment is not triggered only by grand things; the sublime is not hiding in distant landscapes The awe-inspiring, the numinous, is all around us, all the time. It is transformed by our deliberate attention. It becomes valuable when we value it. It becomes meaningful when we invest it with meaning. The magic is of our own conjuring. Hierophany—that revelation of the sacred—is something that we bring to everyday things, rather than something that is given to us. That quality of experience that reveals to us the workings of the world, that comforts and fascinates us, that ushers us towards a greater understanding of the business of being human: it is not in itself rare. What is rare is our will to pursue it. If we wait passively to become enchanted, we could wait a long time.But seeking is a kind of work. I don’t mean heading off on wild road trips just to see the stars that are shining above your own roof. I mean committing to a lifetime of engagement: to noticing the world around you, to actively looking for small distillations of beauty, to making time to contemplate and reflect. To learning the names of the plants and places that surround you, or training your mind in the rich pathways of the metaphorical. To finding a way to express your interconnectedness with the rest of humanity. To putting your feet on the ground, every now and then, and feeling the tingle of life that the earth offers in return. It’s all there, waiting for our attention. Take off your shoes, because you are always on holy ground.-----I have gone looking for one thing and found another, not something rare and celestial and beyond my control, but something that was always within my power to find. The act of seeking attuned my senses and primed my mind to make associations. I was open to magic, and I found some, although not the magic I was looking for. That’s what you find over and over again when you go looking: something else. An insight that surprises you. A connection that you would never have made. A new perspective.More often than not, I find that I already hold all the ideas from which my enchantment is made. The deliberate pursuit of attention, ritual, or reflection does not mystically draw in anything external to me. Instead, it creates experiences that rearrange what I know to find the insights I need today. This is how symbolic thought works. It offers you a repository of understanding that can be triggered by the everyday, and which comes in a format that goes straight to the bloodstream.
Committing to a lifetime of engagement: to noticing the world around you, to actively looking for small distillations of beauty, to making time to contemplate and reflect.
A related essay I that just came across my feed:
Our experience of time is changing. For the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, the early 21st century has left us ‘whizzing without a direction’. Our world is shaped by the restless, disorienting rhythms of near-term deliverables, social media impression counts, technological obsolescence, shallow electoral cycles, rapid news cycles, frenzied culture wars, sudden stock market shifts, gig economy hustles, and occupational burnout. Though it all seems exhausting and unmanageable, the whizzing isn’t slowing: digital platforms now bombard us, minute by minute, with fragments of information that fail to cohere into meaningful narratives, and algorithms that hijack our neurochemical reward systems. . . .Feelings of awe, especially those inspired by natural scenery, can make us feel more collaborative, less egoistic, more altruistic, and more open to social connection. . . . Natural splendour seems to put us in a headspace that lets us reflect on our short lives as ephemeral organisms dwelling on a fragile planet floating in a vast cosmos. This way of thinking can be transformative, but its power is not a recent discovery. Greco-Roman Stoic philosophers, for instance, encouraged retreats into the countryside to proactively ponder life. Venturing into breathtaking outdoor spaces seems to help us step back, slow down and, most importantly, think in the long term. I call this style of thinking ‘longstorming’ because encounters with sublime geophysical and ecological environments can invite the mind to brainstorm about our long-term futures and pasts. . . .Sublime outdoor spaces, such as a redwood forest, can offer a temporal perspective that is rare in contemporary consumer societies. Longstorming acts on this by creating a contemplative headspace in which the fleetingness of the present and the vastness of deep time mingle in harmony. This underscores the importance of conserving outdoor spaces not just as charismatic ecosystems or natural resources, but also as ideational resources for connecting our minds with the deeper timescales of our planet. For some, contemplating these settings may evoke a sense of planetary connection that makes the restless whizzing of our daily lives less oppressive, less urgent. For some, this may also be confronting, as we realise how insignificant our daily concerns are in the grand timelines of the universe. For others, it may shed light on hopes, fears, dreams, anxieties and desires. . . .Fortunately, you do not need to visit charismatic ecosystems, like redwood forests, to begin longstorming. Walking down any city street or a country road, you can attune to how the rocks beneath your feet have multimillion- or multibillion-year geological histories. You can attune to how the air you breathe is altered by decades of carbon emissions. You can attune to the evolutionary histories of the chirping birds or even the cells in your body. Contemplating the passage of time is, at some level, available to anyone willing and able to longstorm – to begin wondering about the longer timelines of the universe. When you return to your smartphone afterwards, you might even look differently at the device itself: less attuned to the newsfeeds and pings, and more attuned to the ancient geological histories of the elements and minerals that make it up. After all, many of the metals found in smartphones, such as gold and copper, were formed billions of years ago among distant stars.
You can attune . . .
the brilliant artistry hidden all around youIt’s fun to think of your favorite musicians, back when they were just starting out. Setting up to perform on a street corner, at a time when nobody had any idea who they were. It makes you wonder: If you had been there, passing on the sidewalk as they played an early masterpiece, would you have noticed? Would you have stopped to listen?How strange that something so vibrant as art is so nearly invisible. Strange how rarely we look up at the architecture, or savor each bite of a meal cooked with care, or stop to pay attention to the music playing in the background, that’s far better than it has any right to be. It’s only after someone points it out, that you finally catch the tune.It makes you wonder if there’s brilliance all around you, hiding in plain sight, just waiting around to see if you’ll notice. Who knows how many Van Goghs you might be walking past, busy doing their work, just a few years too early to recognize? Maybe the next Emily Dickinson is living just down the street, sitting on an unpublished masterpiece; maybe she doesn’t even suspect it, any more than we do.We assume that if a piece is any good, surely it’ll find an audience. But maybe it’s mostly luck. Luck that they’re not already famous. Or luck that the right person just happened to look up. In art as in love, one never knows how two people find each other, if they ever meet at all.Just imagine how much courage it must take, to set a guitar case down on the cobblestones and make that first move, hoping it’ll resonate with someone passing by. To keep pouring your heart into something, even if it falls on deaf ears. Reaching out in the face of indifference, just trying to give people permission to care.Indifference is easy. It takes a lot of courage to fight back against it. So maybe we should stop and count ourselves lucky that there’s still someone out there, fighting the good fight.From silent + brilliance. In a 2007 experiment, violin virtuoso Joshua Bell tried his hand at busking in a subway station, playing for nearly an hour on his priceless Stradivarius. In the end, only seven of a thousand passersby stopped to listen. No applause. He collected $32. But as Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten observed, “Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.” Pronounced “sil-ee-uhns.”
It makes you wonder if there’s brilliance all around you, hiding in plain sight, just waiting around to see if you’ll notice.
Unrelated, but I thought this was a fascinating perspective.
Everyone puts up with mild annoyances each day whether it be at your job, with your family, your habits, your living environment or your body. You brush them off, thinking: this isn’t so bad, so it can’t affect me for very long. I’m not going to move apartments over a lack of natural light, or quit my job because my boss sends emails Friday nights at 10 pm. These complaints are minor, how much distress could they cause me over time? It’s not like my apartment has bed bugs, or my boss screams at me.These situations aren’t that bad, and so you don’t do anything about them, whether it be to take action or kickstart psychological processes to cope. This is the ‘beta region’ – the no-man’s land for circumstances that don’t prompt action or response (the terminology comes from different regions on a graph that describes the phenomenon). The paradox is that these more mild discomforts or relationships can end up lasting much longer and cause you more upset or damage than a situation, person or event that is more acutely upsetting, but which prompts you to take action to resolve it, so that the distress doesn’t last. . . .The region-beta paradox hasn’t received much attention since, but it reveals an important cognitive bias that many of us fall prey to when making decisions – mistakenly thinking that more intense states will always last longer than mild ones. Becoming aware of the paradox reveals that this isn’t always the case, and could help you make better choices so that the little things don’t haunt you for an unusually long time. . . .Once you become aware of the paradox, you can see it play out everywhere. Say your friend has five drinks, so you take away their keys and tell them to take a taxi home. Yet if they have just three glasses, you don’t act and so they take a risky drive home. Or you’re faced with the prospect of a large dessert, but it activates thoughts about eating healthily so you abstain, whereas a bowl of tiny sweets doesn’t trigger the same thought processes, so you nibble away unchecked, ultimately leading to a larger sugar intake.
Make better choices so that the little things don’t haunt you for an unusually long time.
My Econ classes in high school and college never really made sense to me, and I've loved reading the books advocating more realistic behavioral approaches ever since.
Over the past 30 years, PhD-level education in economics has become more empirical, more psychological, and more attuned to the many ways that markets can fail. Introductory economics courses, however, are not so easy to transform. Big, synoptic textbooks are hard to put together and, once they are adopted as the foundation of introductory courses, professors and institutions are slow to abandon them. So introductory economics textbooks have continued to teach that a higher minimum wage leads to fewer people working – usually as an example of how useful and relevant the simple model of competitive markets could be. As a result of this lag between what economists know and how introductory economics is taught, a gulf developed between the way students first encounter economics and how most leading economists practise it. Students learned about the virtues of markets, deduced from a few seemingly simple assumptions. Economists and their graduate students, meanwhile, catalogued more and more ways those assumptions could go wrong. . . .Econ 101 is not changing to reflect a particular ideology; it is finally catching up to the field it purports to represent. . . .Their goal in revising the course was threefold, says Furman. First, the course should be coherent and helpful for students, even if they never take another economics course. Second, it should speak to issues students care about – climate change, poverty and inequality, for example. Third, it should reflect the way economics is practised today, which means more empiricism, more psychology, and more attention to market failures and public policy. . . .It’s tempting to judge CORE and even Harvard’s Ec10 in ideological terms – as an overdue response or countermeasure to a laissez-faire approach. But the evolution of Econ 101 is about more than politics. (Despite its focus on traditionally more progressive topics, CORE has been criticised for being insufficiently ‘heterodox’, according to Stevens.) By elevating empiricism and by teaching multiple models of the economy, students in these new curriculums are learning how social sciences actually work.
I find psychology books are much more helpful in developing me as a professional and leader than business and leadership books.
The more I learn, the more I feel that politics is all a matter of tribal affiliations, not issues.
In the conservative moral worldview, problems like addiction, crime and poverty result from individual failures and shortcomings. Bad behavior must be strongly punished – just as a strict parent might spank a child for misbehaving. In the conservative brain, it doesn't matter whether a policy is effective. Strict punishment is seen as right because it is considered morally correct. Facts and evidence to the contrary don’t matter.In the progressive moral worldview, social ills stem from systemic issues in society. As such progressives favor solutions rooted in empathy and understanding. To continue the parent metaphor, progressive morality is that of a “nurturant parent” who generally prefers more constructive approaches to create pro-social outcomes for the public good. Evidence and facts matter – a lot.
It's about where you feel you belong.
A quick topical note from my profession.
Protesters checked out dozens of gay- and transgender-themed books from a Wichita-area library to keep children from accessing the books. Librarians say checkouts show demand for materials, so they likely will replace missing books and expand their collections.
All attention is good attention.
75. The general tone of this book is:I would add absurd and poignant to that list. The answer, of course, is all of the above. As it is for all 90 multiple-choice questions in the book, written in the form of the Chilean Academic Aptitude Test. Using that form as a vehicle, Zambra provides a collection of snippets that are part poetry, part short story, and part unique. The first section (of five) simply consists of word lists; the questions get longer from there through part four, where the text for a question can run multiple pages, to five, which includes three full short stories. He manages commentary on life in general and, I presume, aspects of his life growing up in Chile. It's a bit confusing, a good bit moving, and entirely enjoyable.
A) Melancholic
B) Comic
C) Parodic
D) Sarcastic
E) Nostalgic
A few more sample problems, starting with one from section II. Sentence Order - Mark the answer that puts the sentences in the best possible order to form a coherent text.
29. BirthdayFrom section III. Sentence Completion - Complete the sentence using the appropriate elements. Mark the answer that best fits the sentence.
1. You wake up early, go for a walk, look for a cafe.
2. It's your birthday, but you don't remember.
3. You feel like you are forgetting something, but it's only a sense of unease, an intuition that something is out of place.
4. You go about your routine, like any other Saturday.
5. You smoke, turn on the TV, fall asleep listening to the midnight news.
A) 5-1-2-3-4
B) 4-5-1-2-3
C) 3-4-5-1-2
D) 2-3-4-5-1
E) 1-2-3-4-5
44. If the __________ within you grows __________, how deep is your __________ !And from section V. Reading Comprehension - Next you will read three texts, each of them followed by questions or problems based on their content. Each question has five possible answers. Mark the one that you think is most appropriate.
A) light dark darkness
B) confusion light flashlight
C) candor lustful schlong
D) love furious divorce
E) humor bitter book
75. The general tone of this story is:
A) Melancholic
B) Comic
C) Parodic
D) Sarcastic
E) Nostalgic
79. The narrator doesn't mention the bride's name because:
A) He wants to protect her. Moreover, he knows that he doesn't have the right to name her, to expose her. That fear of naming her, in any case, is so 1990s.
B) He wants to protect the woman's identity because he's afraid she might sue him.
C) He says he'll eventually forget the woman's name, but maybe he's already forgotten it. Or maybe he's still in love with her. There's someone I'm trying so hard to forget. Don't you want to forget someone too?
D) He's a misogynist. And a sexist. He's so vain, he probably thinks the story is about him. Doesn't he? Doesn't he?
E) If you can't be with the one you love, honey, love the one you're with.
All of the above.
I want to have more original content to share, more of my own unique thoughts and writing, but life has been busy and anxious lately, enough that I'm stuck dwelling far too much of the time in these two states:
3. You feel like you are forgetting something, but it's only a sense of unease, an intuition that something is out of place.
and
Every single thing I must do—any hint of a demand—grinds against me. I resent it all. I want to be left, quietly, alone. I don’t know what I’d do in that time should I ever achieve that perfect aloneness. I like to think I would read, but in truth I would probably sleep. I don’t have the attention for reading. I don’t have the attention for anything, really. My brain feels entirely separate from me. It is empty, but it also cannot take any more in. It seems that it’s a useless organ, endlessly refusing to notice what I want it to notice. It will not engage. It just glances off everything, a pale beam.
So, all things considered, the fact that I'm reading books and sharing content and looking for magic is a sign that, overall, life is good.
posted by Degolar @ 3:24 PM
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