I Still Believe in Magic and Wish on Stars

*Opinions are mine, conclusions are yours. Take what resonates, leave what doesn't. Respectful disagreement always welcome  unkindness never is.

There is a specific kind of look people give you when you point at the sky mid-conversation because you spotted the first star and you need a moment. Not a long moment, just enough to make the wish. The look is fond but slightly puzzled, like they are trying to decide if you are joking and then realizing you are absolutely not joking and recalibrating accordingly.

I have received that look many times. I give it no weight whatsoever. I am a grown adult with opinions about systemic accessibility and a complicated relationship with pants and a genuine working knowledge of several true crime cases, and I also make wishes on stars. These things coexist in me without conflict and I have stopped waiting for someone's permission to think that is perfectly fine.

It Started Before I Knew It Was a Thing

I do not remember deciding to be this way. I did not sit down at some point and choose to be a person who feels a small flutter of possibility at a shooting star or who knocks on wood with the sincere intention of a person who believes in wood. It was just always there. The sense that the world has more going on in it than what can be measured. That certain moments have weight. That paying attention to something, really paying attention, sends something out into the universe that occasionally comes back in a shape you were not expecting. I know how that sounds. I have a whole relationship with how that sounds. I have arrived, after years of occasionally trying to talk myself out of it, at the conclusion that I do not actually want to be talked out of it and that the people who have fully intellectualized the magic out of their lives do not seem measurably happier for having done so.

I will keep the wishes, thank you very much.

The Knock on Wood Is Load Bearing

I want to talk about the knock on wood specifically because I think it illustrates something important about the way this particular brand of magic operates. It is not that I believe, in a fully literal and logical sense, that the wood is doing something. It is that there is a version of me that is not willing to find out what happens if I stop. That version of me is in charge of this specific decision and she is not taking questions.

Same with the eyelash. Same with the clock that lands on 11:11 when I happen to glance at it. Same with the penny facing heads up on the sidewalk that I will absolutely stop to pick up while someone behind me adjusts their pace and reconsiders their route. I am not going to leave that penny. The penny is part of the system. The system is not entirely logical. The system works for me. These are not mutually exclusive statements.

What the Magic Is Actually About

Here is what I think is actually happening underneath all of it, because I have had some time to think about this and I am not entirely without self-awareness. The wishes and the rituals and the small daily acknowledgments that the universe might be listening are not really about outcomes. I have made enough wishes by now to have a realistic sense of the conversion rate. It is not a hundred percent. It is not close to a hundred percent, but making a wish requires you to know what you want. It requires you to stop for one second in the middle of whatever is happening and locate the thing you are hoping for and say it, even if only in your head, even if only to a star that is several light years away and almost certainly not monitoring the situation. That pause, that moment of knowing what you want and putting it somewhere outside yourself, is not nothing. It is actually something. It is a small act of hope and hope is a practice and practices require repetition.

The star is just where I aim it.

I want to be clear that I am not recruiting. If you are a person who has made peace with a fully disenchanted world and you are doing well in it, I am genuinely happy for you and I respect the journey. Different operating systems for different people. I am not here to tell you that you should be wishing on things. I am just not willing to stop. Not because I cannot make a case against it but because the part of me that lights up when I spot the first star at dusk is one of my favorite parts of myself and I see no reason to rationalize her out of existence in the name of being a serious adult. Serious adults are allowed to have a little magic running quietly in the background. It does not interfere with anything. It makes the whole thing a little better.

I will be outside tonight. Looking up. You already know why.