The Adult Magic: Why We Need Wonder in a Rational World
At thirty-nine, I still check my horoscope, though I’ll deny it if asked directly. I still wish on airplane lights mistaken for stars, still hold my breath through tunnels, still knock on wood after tempting fate with words. These small rituals feel foolish in daylight, but I perform them anyway—residual believers in a world that trained us to stop believing.
When did we learn to be embarrassed by wonder? When did magic become the enemy of maturity?
I watch my son discover the world through eyes that haven’t yet learned the difference between possible and impossible. To him, coincidences are messages, patterns are prophecies, and the ordinary world pulses with invisible meaning. He talks to plants because why wouldn’t they listen? He expects lost things to return because love should be stronger than physics.
His magic isn’t about supernatural powers—it’s about radical openness to mystery, to connection, to the possibility that the universe might be far more alive and responsive than our adult minds allow.
But somewhere in the archaeology of growing up, we learn that magic is childish, that rational adults deal in facts and probabilities, not wishes and wonder. We trade enchantment for explanation, mystery for mastery. We learn to see the world as a collection of problems to be solved rather than a mystery to be lived.
The tragedy is that we banish magic exactly when we need it most. Childhood magic is about possibility—the belief that transformation is always available, that the story can always change, that help comes from unexpected places. Adult life, with its mortgage payments and medical diagnoses and relationship failures, desperately needs this same conviction: that change is possible, that help is coming, that we are part of something larger than our immediate circumstances.
But we’ve convinced ourselves that believing in magic makes us weak, naive, unprepared for reality. We’ve confused magical thinking—the delusion that our thoughts control outcomes—with magical openness—the wisdom that outcomes often emerge from sources beyond our understanding or control.
I notice I’m most drawn to magic when logic fails me. When my son was sick and the doctors were puzzled, I found myself bargaining with the universe, making promises to gods I’m not sure I believe in. When I was unemployed and prospects seemed nonexistent, I started paying attention to omens, to meaningful coincidences, to signs that might point toward unseen opportunities.
These weren’t lapses in judgment—they were recognitions that rational analysis has limits, that some of life’s most important questions can’t be answered through data alone. They were acknowledgments that mystery remains, no matter how much we pretend to have figured out.
Maybe adult magic isn’t about believing in fairies or casting spells. Maybe it’s about staying open to surprise, to serendipity, to the possibility that the world is more interconnected and alive than our education taught us. Maybe it’s about maintaining what the Buddhists call beginner’s mind—the ability to encounter reality with fresh eyes rather than through the filter of what we think we already know.
I think of the moments when magic broke through my adult defenses: when I met my wife through a series of seemingly impossible coincidences, when the perfect job appeared exactly when I needed it, when my son was born and I felt the presence of something infinitely larger than medicine or biology could explain.
These experiences didn’t violate the laws of physics, but they violated the laws of cynicism. They reminded me that rationality and wonder aren’t opposites—they’re partners in the dance of making sense of this strange, beautiful, inexplicable experience of being alive.
The horoscope I check isn’t really about planetary influences—it’s about the radical possibility that I’m part of a story larger than the one I can see. The wish on the airplane light isn’t really about making dreams come true—it’s about keeping the channel open to surprise, to help, to grace.
Adults haven’t given up on magic because we’ve outgrown it. We’ve given up on it because we’re afraid—afraid of being disappointed, afraid of being fooled, afraid of being seen as naive. But what if naivety is just another word for hope? What if wonder is just another form of wisdom?
My son still believes in magic because he hasn’t yet learned to be afraid of it. Maybe the question isn’t whether magic is real, but whether we’re brave enough to stay open to the possibility that reality includes more mystery, more connection, more possibility than our adult minds typically allow.
Because the world is already magical—we’ve just forgotten how to see it.