Pure Magic
on progress and dance crushes
What is this stuff we call magic?
Perched in an Amsterdam café, surrounded by smiling, focused, laughing peers. Happy baristas. Clean, quiet, stylish environment. This is magic.
Music piped into my ears, familiar yet new, inviting me to move my body. Four dollar earbuds, purchased spontaneously in Buenos Aires, dropping crisp notes while shielding me from nearby conversations. This is magic.
Yesterday, a train conveys me westward from Berlin at 200 kilometers/hour. My bike hangs from a secure hook. Despite arriving late, I am rested, calm, and caught up on work. This voyage cost me one hour of labor. This is magic.
Last weekend, in Berlin, dancing all night with talented, charming, wild, mad partners. Cycling home through Deutsche daybreak as birds chirp and revelers revel. Playing two carefully curated music sets, watching sixty human bodies respond in parallel harmonic motion. After so much yearning and practice and sweat and awkwardness, I finally feel like a good dancer, one who others seek. I am accepted. This is magic.
The weekend before, in Toulouse, more such magic, with a twist—a new crush. Arriving from Switzerland via Senegal, she finds herself at a crossroads. Thirty-three, no job, no plans beyond singing and strumming her guitar at summer festivals. She has left the lawyer life behind, and the depression that accompanied it. A last-minute addition to our shared apartment, we feel each other out through group meals and banter. She is jubilant, inquisitive, sarcastic, beautiful, and a natural partner dancer. Soon we are greedy for each other’s words and eyes. We steal away to stroll ancient French cobblestones and canals, asking endless probing vulnerable questions. She calls me The King of Questions; she’s not far from royalty herself. We laugh and cuddle on a creaky sofa-bed with mutual friends dozing nearby. We are surprised to feel so comfortable, so quickly. This is magic.
Another twist—at the same Toulouse weekend, I have another crush. We met at a dance in Vienna last fall, spiraling toward each other with immediate, crushing, neutron-star gravity. Kind eyes, wide smile, playful dances, devastating wit and charm and intellect. We stayed in touch over the winter, voice-messaging as I traversed Patagonia, and recently met again in Innsbruck. We adore each other. And also, we each adore others. We are dancing in open embrace, clearly connected, with many degrees of freedom. In Toulouse, she also finds herself gravitating toward new stellar bodies, and we spend less time together than we imagined. Yet we are really, truly, happy for each other, sharing snippets of our contemporaneous journeys, laughing together at this life. The connection does not falter. Our dance continues. This is magic.
A few days after Toulouse, the Swiss crush calls me. “I want to come to Berlin. I want to see you again.” Always, I have been the one proposing such ludicrous schemes. Never are they proposed to me. I am flattered, honored, enamored. After a little back-and-forth about the risks of such furious forward motion, I say yes, please come to Berlin. Stay with me. This is magic.
I voice-message Vienna, who will also be in Berlin. She appreciates the heads-up. Then I realize they’re taking the same flight from France to Germany. I inform them. Switzerland proposes that they meet. They both like the idea. They message. They meet. “What a cool person,” each tells me later. “I can see why you like her.”
This. Is. Magic.
Much of what we take for granted today would be considered magic to someone living a few hundred years ago, let alone a few thousand.
Technology, transportation, peace, prosperity.
But also: experiences, opportunities, ways of living, ways of relating.
Indoor plumbing, individual rights, international travel.
Bicycles, bananas, Burning Man.
National parks and narrow-spectrum antibiotics, Wikipedia and Whatsapp.
Deutschland-tickets and fusion dance weekends.
The mere fact that I had these experiences,
that I can share them with you,
Pure magic.
"We are the music-makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."
—Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1873) / Willy Wonka (1971)