About a month ago we were at the hospital getting an MRI and MRA done on Peg’s brain. It was a followup to a repair to a minor stroke she had a little over a year ago. The good news is that all is well. No changes. And the even better news is that the stroke itself was relatively mild with only slight ongoing consequences.

The reason I say that “magic” happens all the time is that our doctor was able to send a teeny tiny stainless steel web into the right place in her brain to “fix” an aneurysm and hopefully prevent any further problems caused by the aneurysm.

Twenty or even thirty years ago I started admitting that there’s LOT of stuff going on now that I simply don’t understand. How computers operate for example. Back in the 80’s I won an Apple Computer because at the press release of the movie 2001: a Space Odyssey I happened to have a card taped to the bottom of my theater seat and I won the door prize. l didn’t understand what computers did then — in the days of floppy disks and 4k chip speeds — you had to program databases by hand using dBase, and nothing happened quickly by today’s standards but it did happen quickly by 1980’s standard.s.

AT the time I just started saying that anything I didn’t understand was magic. And that has been a fall back position for me, and I appreciate the ability, sometimes, just to step back and be amazed. I’m not a great collaborator, or team player. All my life I’ve been a loner and I’m fine with that. I accept that I don’t understand the mindset of having a small part in a very large undertaking. I was been self-employed for probably 2/3 to 3/4 of my career and I liked it that way. The advantages of many people each with their own specialty and skills working to accomplish an exceedingly complex project is simply not something I wanted to be part of. A lot of other people did and I was glad to have them do what made them happy — and I did likewise.

I find, however, that being able to accept the “magic” in this world has been a good thing for me. It has made me appreciate a great many things that otherwise I would have struggled to understand. Understanding, you see is the thing that moves me forward — that inspires me — that thrills me. I love learning, but this world has gotten so complex that no one can ever really grasp more than an infinitesimal speck of what’s out there. It’s the way it should be — and this is the only way I can deal with it.

But, being amazed, opens the prospect for a great many new insights. When you realize that you don’t understand a thing you begin to accept that there are other ways; ways you yourself would never have considered that work quite nicely.

I have to say that accepting the magic in the universe has helped me a lot when it comes to understanding my belief on God, and what he/she is doing in the universe. When I was younger I had a pretty complete view of the universe; the older I get the more I realize that then I knew nothing, and now I know less than a speck of something — but that the things I thought had to be certain ways don’t have to be anything like I originally thought. That has released me and captured me at the same time. I no longer have to have an answer. But I can also look about and realize that even the wildest answer I might have could easily not be anywhere near comprehensive enough to solve a real problem.

Christian faith is magic, and one day soon I want to share some thoughts about the nature of faith, but for now I just want to share that there is so much more going on around us than we can even perceive. Just like looking at a computer and wondering how it does it’s job, we look at the images from the Hubbell or the Web telescopes and realize that our wildest imaginings about the size of the universe and it’s complexity don’t even scratch the surface. I find it makes me want to be less judgmental and more willing to accept un-thought possibilities. The same creator who made more than 100,000 species of cockroach has a much broader idea of what diversity is, of what creativity is, of what it means to have “enough”. And to me, that’s just magic.