“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” ― W.B. Yeats
“There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle. The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt is awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” ― Albert Einstein
When I first saw this commercial way back in 2000 (almost 25 years ago- yikes!) I was just awe struck. It definitely touched a chord in me- I was so moved and enchanted. The idea of eschewing a drink-y house party with noise and people to drive around quietly with your favorite people? Bliss. Remember, this was the days before social media (besides blogs) and online HD video/photography/drone, etc. so commercials (and the Travel Channel- I was absolutely addicted to “Great Hotels with Samantha Brown”) often presented ideas and environments that people normally weren’t encountering.
I just showed this ommercial to my daughter, thinking she might really “get it”, too because she’s sensitive like me and definitely more of a “drive around under the moonlight” than “loud house party” kind of person. Her response was “that’s sorta cute,” and then she wandered off.
I’ll admit, I was a little heartbroken by her response- I thought she might get the same kind of feeling from it that I do, even now, but it made me realize that everyone’s experiences in life and what they find meaningful are so vast and different.
Of course there’s generational things- I’m sure my daughter’s idea of “enchanted” is different than mine based on what she’s been through and what she wants from life and what makes her feel a certain kind of way. And she’s grown up seeing both real life and artificially generated images or places and worlds and experiences that are way more exciting than cruising around in a car at night.
That kinda makes me a little sad, though. I have been noticing that people’s expectations of life and things like relationships and everyday experiences have changed a lot in the last decade or so- everything has to be aesthetic and a little bit over-the-top. I stumbled on a blog the other day written by someone in their early 40’s and I was struck that even though we are mostly in the same generation, their expectations of their partner were like something out of an anime- they really seemed to thrive on a lot of drama and ups and downs and relished talking about it. I had to click away pretty quickly- it made me feel a little uneasy. Maybe I’m super old fashioned, but inciting drama and unnecessary emotional turmoil into any relationship- romantic, friendship, family, etc- doesn’t resonate with me. I mean, I’m all for excitement and feeling emotional highs and a sense of “wow!” with life, but … but inviting conflict is something I’m not a fan of just because one of my parents sort of did that as a part of her mental illness.
I sometimes I feel like I’m sort of flying alone on earth- like it’s a big organic spaceship gently moving through the universe (which it is- even if you view the Earth on a fixed path, the universe itself is constantly in motion, so the Earth really never returns to the same spot twice if you take that into account…).
I’m surrounded by other people, but not really connecting with many of them. Not on some marrow-deep level. Especially as I get older- I’m starting to learn the differences between judgement and discernment, and starting to be okay with the things that matter to me and the things that make sense to me and the things that feel right to me, even if those things don’t resonate or move other people who are close to me as strongly as they move me. I no longer feel the need to try and “nuance” them down so that other people can understand them, or agree with them. I’m not interested in disowning the things that draw me in just to make other people “fit” with me better.
One thing I’ve hung on to over the years is the idea of mystery – the things humans don’t know yet. I always come back to my own sense that we are VERY very early on as far as the evolution of human intelligence and there’s still so much left to discover and learn. There’s no possible way we know a great deal about anything, really. There’s still so much that’s unknown and a mystery, and there’s something truly magical and spooky about that, in a good way. The kind of way that makes my hair stand on end and gives me great hope.
It also makes me conflicted about AI. I see the amazing promise in it, the way it can analyze great sets of data and find things we need to know- information about previously assumed “incurable” diseases, human suffering, etc. I also love the speculative nature of it- I love seeing AI generated architecture, especially. It’s so weird and cool. If I can ever figure it out, I am going to try and get it to generate images of the Earth from space during different eras, so I can see what it looked like when different continental clusters existed and perhaps the different eras in topography and even ocean coloration. I’m fascinated by that- that the terrain has changed so much on earth, and that everything is always moving, changing.
When I think of things like that, the idea that we might be decimating the environment is so hard to deal with- it would be SUCH a great loss to destroy this beautiful, incredibly unique and diverse and STUNNING planet that we have. I mean we search outside our solar system with big telescopes for something amazing, and most of what we are looking for we already have, we just don’t really take the time to look or think about it. I’d love it if there was more of it on social media- and there is a lot of it- but you have to wade through a lot of photographs of coffee cups and makeup and cars and selfies to get to it. So I’ll just stick to my growing collection of landscape photography and travel books and give myself goosebumps while I ponder it all (listening to M83 or Sigur Ros while I’m looking at those books is sort of transcendent- I’m not going to lie. I definitely love kind of tripping myself up that way sometimes when I need a jolt of awe…)
I guess that despite feeling a little bit behind the curve by holding on to parts of myself in different times of my life, and the things that moved me, I’m grateful that I can still find awe in my quiet world, in my imagination and my way of seeing and thinking about things. My brain frustrates me sometimes because it feel things way way too deeply and it makes me hurt, but it’s because of that sensitivity to everything, maybe, that I can find the magic in the things I do, as corny as that sounds.
Beautiful. I asked an older woman experiencing vision problems , I volunteered to drive her to an appointment, what the most beautiful thing she has ever seen was. She was full of anger and resentment and could think of nothing. The eye doctor hearing this asked me what some of the most beautiful things I had seen were. I chuckled to myself because of the circumstances of when and where it happened but I told them. I was somewhere high in the mountains of ______________ after week of heavy snow making a bad job even worse. Suddenly an explosion in the area I was observing sent out an ever growing perfectly circular wave of snow falling off the trees reaching out for miles till the shockwave almost knocked me over. I had never before or since seen anything like it amazingly beautiful. Number two; a long time I drove for a living and one freezing December morning as I headed directly east I drove at highway speed into a fog of ice crystals so thick I could barely see past my windshield. Terrified that a vehicle in front of me might stop due to a panicked driver I was screaming inside my head just as the sun broke over the horizon and turned the entirety of what I could see the brightest gold as if I was passing through the gates of heaven. Golden light everywhere for what I would say was eight Mississippi’s then the fog cleared like I went through a door and the road ahead was clear and empty. between the relief and the vision of the golden world still in my head I was nearly overwhelmed with an emotion I can’t name. A very close third most beautiful sight was sitting outside at the top of a mountain pass at about ten thousand feet on a very clear night during a heavy meteor shower. A good burning streak across the sky about every twenty seconds for a good part of the night crazy cool. Gifts and magic all around you if you allow yourself to see it.