Magic

One of my favorite songs is called “Wonderful Life”, by Black, and it says that there's magic everywhere you look. There are people who go through life without realizing it.

I was volunteering at a hospital. One morning, I found myself standing next to the bed of a woman in her seventies who was lamenting her life—not her present life, but her past. Confined to her bed, she was reflecting on her life and, without realizing it, venting her complaints aloud so that everyone could hear them.

It struck me deeply, and at the same time, I was overcome with a great sadness, because there was no solution to any of the things he lamented. He said he had spent his entire life on his feet, behind the counter of a tobacco shop, working harder than he should have.

The woman felt as though she had lived too little or had failed to make certain decisions (as St. Teresa of Ávila said). One day she realized it: she woke up, saw, and came to the realization that there is only one life, but, swept along by inertia, she had done what she had to do, letting herself be carried along by the current. Why hadn’t she realized it sooner?

On our life There aren't always major dramas or crises; sometimes it's just a feeling of being there, but not quite being there. We want what we're supposed to want; we study the major we're supposed to study, and that's how our days go by.

We go with the flow of life, which sweeps us along because that's what's expected of us. That momentum leads us to put off the things that truly matter to us, because we believe it's not the right time to deal with them.

It is an inauthentic, unfulfilling existence in which one forgets oneself. Not because it is necessarily bad, but because we haven’t stopped to think about whether we might want something more out of life. When we live like this, we aren’t living our own lives—we’re simply going through the motions, missing out on the moments of magic.