Everyday Magic
“Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” – Roald Dahl
The greatest treasure on earth doesn’t hang in museums or hide behind bank vaults. It is not available exclusively to the rich and famous, or the Beautiful People of Beverly Hills.
I believe the greatest treasure on earth is ordinary love – people living life with each other through all the years of pain and uncertainty, and remaining together in spite of and because of each other. As this compounds into decades of friendship and generations of families, the transforming beauty and power become breathtaking, and simple words or tokens of affection carry a weight beyond what our hearts can comprehend.
Many of us experience some level of this love, but in our ambition, pursuit of solvency, stress of responsibility, and anxiety of the future, we often don’t see it until a disrupting event like a wedding or funeral temporarily awakens us to the beauty of what we have.
My cousins are farm boys living in the country on the edge of Indiana. They work at small stores in town, and will probably spend the rest of their lives there. History will not remember them, no one would think they are important figures, and if it wasn’t for the fact that we are related, I wouldn’t know them or seek out their company. But I love my cousins, and their simple faith and love has touched me and changed me more than all my writing, acting, and other futile attempts at immortality can hope to achieve.
I can be consumed with making money, but money never blessed me more than sitting around a Thanksgiving table telling family stories. The magic of Christmas, first snowfalls, dreaming with old friends, and discovering new ones. Maybe it’s inevitable that our senses grow dull to what daily surrounds us. But it is these things that touch us deepest, and we may only realize how much they mean, how deeply they are woven into our souls, when they are taken away.
Thankfulness is one way to combat this blindness – keeping a gratitude journal or counting one’s blessings before going to bed. As Ann Voskamp writes in One Thousand Gifts, thankfulness is a way to see everything for the gift of grace it is and name it as such.
It’s easy to allow the demands and busyness of life to distract us from what we value or should value most. So many businessmen of my father’s generation spent their whole lives providing for their families, instead of being with their families. I regularly reevaluate my time, money, and focus to see if they align with my true priorities. It’s also a chance to remind myself of those priorities and see them in the faces of family and friends.
Life is so fragile, and these precious things we take for granted are soon gone forever. My work, art, dreams, and plans don’t matter as much as I think they do. But people matter, love matters, and so does the glory of everyday magic surrounding us.
May we see it and treasure it.
J.
Feb. 5, 2020