The magic of every day

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Life is not meant to be experienced as mundane, boring, tiresome, or monotonous. For small children, life is certainly not any of those things. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in his famous children’s book, “The Little Prince”, makes the point that adults cannot see what is invisible but small children can.

- JOANNA KITTO

Small children live in a magical way, taking full enjoyment from what is in front of them, being very present, and using their imagination to imbue their experiences with magic. As children become older and more aware of the difficulties of life, and as children turn into adults - this magic disappears. Adults forget. And yet, many of us would say that we can recall some moments of magic.

They are usually moments of great clarity, of insights, of heightened awareness. We understand something in those moments that we had not realised before, and we are changed. The beauty of synchronicity, of serendipity, of seeing 'beyond'. These kinds of experiences, from the point of view of spirituality, show us that everything we experience externally is a trigger for the amazing resources and qualities that we have inside. We do not have to wait for those moments of alignment, we can create 'magic' moments in our everyday life, with a little practice.

Magic has the power to transform the routine and mundane. Why is it difficult for us to experience daily magic? It is because we have become 'adult' and have become slaves to our habits; we have started to operate on autopilot. Research has shown that 90 per cent of our thoughts today are exactly the same as the ones we had the day before, and the day before that. We are going through the motions, while simply not being present.

We get consumed by the demands and responsibilities we have in life, and we turn to distractions of all kind rather than deal with our inner world. We have to learn to look much deeper than what we perceive on a physical level.