Believing in MAGIC
by Kim Michael
Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved
This morning on CBS This Morning— journalist and reporter DAVID BEGNAUD did a captivating story about a little seven year old California girl named Madeline who loves unicorns. Madeline is what you call a unicorn aficionado. She knows everything there is to know about unicorns. And if you don’t know this, ( I didn’t) unicorns are the national symbol of Scotland—the symbol of purity.
Now everything in Madeline’s room is “unicorn” inspired: the decorations, pictures on the wall, stuffed animals, toys…everything. So she did what any seven year old girl who loves unicorns would do. She went to her mother and asked if she could have one.
And what did her mother do? This is what’s really interesting about this little story. Instead of smiling and shaking her head and telling little Madeline that there is no such thing as a unicorn, she decided to turn it into a learning experience, because wanting something, whether it is a toy, or a hamster, or even a unicorn, means taking responsibility for it, and caring for it. People, (even grown ups) sometimes forget that part about things they want. Anyway, she had to get permission from someone, so what better place than the Los Angeles County's Department of Animal Care and Control. So she wrote to them and this could have been where this story ends except for one very caring official who actually responded back, sending little Madeline a letter explaining the rules of owning a unicorn, and more importantly, including an official looking document that was a license granted to Madeline to legally have a unicorn.
Now, there is much more to this story than I am writing here and you can see it all on the link I am including, but my real reason for writing about this is not really just a story about a unicorns and the little girl that loves them (which admittedly is a sweet little story in its own rite), but it is about that ethereal, wondrous, indescribable power in the universe we call “MAGIC”.
*Here is the website to see David Begnaud and the CBS story I promised: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/unicorn-license-girl-los-angeles-county-california-possible-imagination-determination/ .
MAGIC is defined by the *Oxford Languages Dictionary as the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or 
supernatural forces. But to me it’s a lot more even than that. I look at it as the ability to believe that “anything” is possible, and it is a precious gift with which we are all born, but sadly it fades as we grow older, and harder, and more jaded, until one day we leave the innocence of childhood behind and the magic we once saw so clearly, leaves us orphaned in is absence.
Still, there are people, grown up people, adults, who seem to be able to hold on to the gift; people who can still believe in MAGIC. Walt Disney is a classic example. He turned his own version of magic into a creative empire: Disneyland, Disney World, a movie and entertainment conglomerate unlike any other. There are others too, Steve Jobs, George Lucas, Jeff Bezos, Albert Einstein, Frank Lloyd Wright—the list of visionaries and creators of all kinds goes on and on. All of these people, and many many more, believe in MAGIC because they believe that anything is possible, and because of that belief, they were and are able to do incredible things. They also share a strange kind of ignorance—all of them, without exception, don’t know that what they do is supposed to be IMPOSSIBLE.
And surprisingly you look at it globally, there are literally millions of people around the world who collectively and genuinely believe in MAGIC as well. It is said that at least 50% of the people who live in Iceland truly believe in fairies and elves, to the point that road construction is often diverted from areas where builders believe they live, and Iceland isn’t the only country. Even America leads the world in people who believe that angels are real, and I tend to think that most of us, in some way shape or form, believe in MAGIC… or wants to.
But there is even a more direct relationship that I would like you to consider. If you’ve have read any of my business articles which you can find on my blog entitled “The Quintessential Sales Man”, you know I talk a great deal about CREATIVITY, and in many respects MAGIC, and CREATIVITY, and INSPIRATION, and even IMAGINATION, share the same kind of POSITIVE ENERGY.
Now, it is worth mentioning, but I will not dwell on it: There is also a dark side to magic; the idea that George Lucas explored in his movie “Star Wars”, that there is a dark force in the universe which is the exact antithesis of a “positive” force, but unlike that of Lucas’ movie, the dark force or black magic of our real world comes to us in the in the way of paranoia, fear, anxiety, and the negative dark mentality that can sometimes overtake us. To be fair I felt I had to mention it, but it is a topic, because of its complexity, for another day.
So, looking at the “positive” energy of MAGIC, I believe CREATIVITY and MAGIC to be almost interchangeable, and probably the greatest part of MAGIC is the same as that of CREATIVITY. They both share the same positive energy of imagination, inspiration, ingenuity, and the ability to believe in miracles. And if you think about it, every advancement of mankind is a result of that enigmatic force of boundless imagination that you associate with MAGIC. It allows us to believe that even the impossible…is possible; and I suspect if it were possible to show a television or an IPHONE to someone a hundred years ago, I guarantee they would think it MAGIC. And quite literally you could say that about most, if not all, of our technological advancements.
Still, even CREATIVITY, can be like a bull in a china shop, and in some case even a dangerous force. Picasso once said that every act of creation begins 
with an act of destruction. It sounds a bit dramatic, but if you think about it, new ideas and new technology often negates the ideas and technology that came before them. The evolution of advancement can be, and often is, painful. At the very least, it calls for an abrupt and often uncomfortable change of direction.
As an author intensely interested in CREATIVITY, while writing a paper on the subject, I ran across an article (I don’t remember where I saw it) but, it was about a company whose research and development department had encountered what was the equivalent to a “writer’s block” except it was in their research and development department. It came in the way of a mounting number of problems that they just couldn’t solve. They worked tirelessly on them for months, even going so far as to hire the best of the best scientists, but to no avail. In a final act of desperation the company decided to take a novel approach. An experiment. They would open it up to what we call “crowd sourcing” today, though this was years ago and no one had ever tried it before.
So the idea was that they would offer cash prizes for anyone who could come up with solutions to their problems. At the outset they received thousands of responses from all across the country. Some outlandish, unbelievable, even crazy ideas and after only a few days they seriously considered chucking the whole idea thinking it a complete failure. And then something happened. A scientist looked at one of of the crazy, outlandish ideas and realized— it was the answer they were looking for! And then came another answer and then another. Now that is not to say that they did not have to wade through a lot of really bad ideas to get to a few good ones, but the comment the scientist made most often afterward, was, that the answers came from places and directions that they would never have remotely considered. They were unable to see beyond their own paradigms to find the place where the answers had been waiting for them all along. I often wonder how much we fail to see in our own lives, when we don’t give MAGIC its due.
So if there is a take away in this whole story I think that it is this. MAGIC is all around us, maybe not the way we often think, but it’s there. Whenever 
we embrace the world in all its simplistic complexity; opening our minds and hearts to a universe of endless wonder and infinite possibility, the richness and quality of or own lives becomes dramatically greater. MAGIC will always be there, waiting for us. It is our enduring licensure to believe in intangibles like: love, and faith, and miracles, and even…unicorns.
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