We either live our life as if everything is a miracle or nothing is a miracle.

-Albert Einstein

We may not recognize it but we are surrounded by magic everyday. The magic that can change our lives is the same magic we ignore or take for granted. If you are lucky enough to wake up in the arms of a person you love and who loves you back you are surrounded by a heady kind of magic. The miracle of a child, the love of a job, being kind, and doing good for others is just some of the magic life has to offer. It goes on around us all the time but we have to meet life there at these deeper layers and embrace what it has to offer or we can completely miss out on it.

Instead we preoccupy ourselves with what irritates us, the things we don’t have, and all we wish we were, that in the end just don’t matter. This endless cycle of desire and focusing on what we lack keeps us sidetracked from experiencing the magic of being alive. (If you’re grumbling under your breath about how there’s no such thing as magic, keep looking, I promise you it’s there.) Think about your family and the home you grew up in, there’s a heavy percentage of people in our own backyard and around the world that don’t have shelter or enough food. The list only gets longer when we begin looking more closely at what we already possess that usually goes overlooked.

In order to be able to see some magic of the everyday we have to start thinking about others as fondly as we think of ourselves. This is a gift that brings us in closer alignment with our soul. It’s never just about the bank teller or grocery clerk on the other side of the counter from us, but a person who has struggles, loves, losses, and are full and complete in their own right, not just an appendage to our day. It’s always about seeing the whole, not just pieces and parts, what suits us or what doesn’t. The trick is seeing that everyone and everything is as important as we are and plays a unique role in the bigger picture. Then it becomes easy to notice the magic of everyday offerings.

Lately dragonflies have been following me as I do laps in the pool, one even flew into my window for a brief moment at a red light. This is but one of the many reminders of the magic life has waiting to be recognized and enjoyed. They are the infinite little connections that fill our days, our job is to ready ourselves to see them and join in. We shift our seeing and our being when we open to these deeper layers of the world that surrounds us. Jung called it living the symbolic life and I would say we all have our own particular way of doing this, from ruminating physicists to gardeners tending their plants to typing away in front of a keyboard. There are endless ways to tap into the deeper strata of what’s going on in this universe we call home.

So go ahead and open to the unseen magic that follows you around everyday, it holds the key to your secret self.

kb