Magic in the Mundane

What I’m about to share with you is going to sound a little crazy, probably because I’m a little crazy. Okay, more than a little. Regardless, I ask that you humor me while I try to explain my craziness. Are you ready? Here it goes: I believe in magic.  I think the only reason other people don’t is they aren’t looking hard enough.

Still here? Good. Now, I’m sure you’re thinking to yourself “how can this person possibly think such a ridiculous thing?” Or maybe you aren’t, but I’m going to assume you are because that’s basically the entire point of me writing this strange little monologue.

So I believe in magic. For my first piece of evidence, look no further than this essay. There is a good chance that I don’t know you, never will know you, and you live hundreds if not thousands of miles away from me. Yet without me saying anything, I’m talking to you. Sure you can’t talk back, but still- even if I got eaten by a bear tomorrow, you could still read this. I could, in effect, talk to you from beyond the grave. How cool is that? Just by writing, I get a limited form of immortality.

It’s not limited to me either. Think of how many things you’ve read where the author has been dead for decades, or even centuries. But people still read their thoughts, still draw inspiration from them, and still base their actions on what they read. Despite being long dead, those people are still shaping the world. And people wonder why authors always get such big egos.

Can you honestly say the ability to share ideas, thoughts, and feelings across time and space isn’t a kind of magic? That being able to change how people act despite being dead isn’t kind of amazing? We always hear about ghosts and spirits inspiring and guiding people and dismiss it as nonsense, when it happens literally every day. Okay, it’s not like the ghost of Henry David Thoreau appears to people preaching about simplicity every time someone cracks open Walden, but you know what I mean.

Not convinced yet? Fine. Think about music. Music is just vibrations in the air, and that’s it. Just a bunch of vibrations set up to sound nice to people. Yet despite having no tangible form, it is perhaps the most powerful mood-altering drug known to mankind. There’s music that inspires, music that infuriates, music that sends people into the darkest pits of despair, music that gives you so much energy it makes you get up and dance. And it doesn’t even really exist in the strictest sense of the term.

That’s why I think of musicians and magicians as one and the same. Say you’re feeling really depressed, so you put on your favorite song and it pulls you out of your funk. With sound alone, that musician has banished your bad thoughts and feelings- and he or she did it without being within a hundred miles of you. Sounds like a magic spell to me.

What I think is really amazing about music, and art in general, is that it gives form to things that are abstract. Nowhere is this more important to than with emotions. You know how with colors you can’t really describe them to a blind man? Emotions are the same way. Try this: think about a single emotion, and try and describe it in a way that doesn’t include A) framing it in terms of other emotions or B) talking about a situation where one would feel that emotion.


Hard, isn’t it? That’s what art is for. Words can only get you so far with some things before you have to resort to other ways of describing it. However, if I say that a song is happy, or sad, or angry, it’s pretty easy to understand what I mean. Art in all forms is a form of communication that picks up where language fails.

Maybe I am crazy, but that’s fine. Honestly, would it be worse to be crazy or to live in a world without magic? I’ll leave that question to the philosophers. Even I don’t have enough time on my hands to debate that question. I think I’ll just listen to some music instead.