The "magic" of life...

This past weekend I was with my family celebrating the birthday of one of my nieces.  While having a great meal at a downtown Toronto restaurant and enjoying light conversation, our table was approached by the restaurant's "entertainer" - a magician.  The man, likely in his 40s, with a great sense of humour, amazed us and our children with wonderful tricks carried out with his hands and a few simple props - rubber bands, cards, balloons and coins.  We were all impressed at his ability to manipulate these small objects with his fingers, the movements so quick and subtle that they were clearly much faster than our eyes, which were intently focused on and glued to his intricate movements.  We were all hugely impressed by the tremendous skills that he had acquired, obviously through many years of honing his craft.

Between the tricks, while removing the "props" for the next feat out of his silver magician's box, he kept our attention with stories and anecdotes which brought a smile to the face of both my five year old as swell as our zeide/grandfather.  Partly due to the warm-hearted and open nature of the man, and perhaps due the safety of the numbers comprising our larger party, we began to ask the man several personal questions.  Amongst these questions was this one: How did you get involved with magic?  What made you decide to make this your profession and career?  Perhaps we were also wondering, though noone was quite brave enough to ask, "what made you decide to make a living performing these small-scale slight-of-hand tricks, while moving from table to table at a family restaurant"?

Actually, I am not sure what answer we were expecting to these questions.  Personally, I expected him to say that he had seen Doug Henning or some other world famous magician as a small child, and ever since then was inspired to master the amazing skills which would mesmerize and thrill audiences around the world.  To our surprise, the answer was not quite what we expected.  As it turns out, the man was working for a magazine company about 10 years ago, in their printing department.  One day, his left hand - as it turned out, his dominant hand - was accidentally caught in a printing machine causing massive lacerations to the fingers. He ended up requiring 65 stitches and had major deficits in his ability to use his left hand.  To this day, a large part of his hand has no feeling.  As part of the long and difficult rehabilitation process, he started doing small magic tricks with the goal of stimulating and strengthening the small muscles of his left hand.  Over time, what began as a goal to exercise his traumatized hand and to improve recovery after a career and life-changing injury, became a passion.   He told us that he began to search out and read every book he could find on magic - he currently has a huge library of magic books at home.  And, ultimately, magic became his new career.

The skeptics in the crowd will, no doubt, say the following: Sure, nice story; so nice to see that he is doing professionally something that he loves and is truly passionate about, but what kind of  a living can one make doing this, anyway?  How happy and fulfilled can he really be doing small and simple tricks for some strangers at a simple family restaurant.

Personally, I was thinking something else.  What came to mind are phrases such as "behind every cloud is a silver lining", and "when one door closes another one opens".  I'm sure you can come up with another one of these expressions that we hear all the time.  But...behind these seemingly simple statements, is a very deep and profound life philosophy and belief.   The faith that when we are confronted by a negative life event, no matter how small or how massively tragic and life-altering, this will lead to something positive.  Taken even further, it is the faith and belief that the most difficult things that we confront in life are not sporadic, accidental or random, but are there for a very specific reason.  And that reason is a positive one, which will ultimately lead us into a new direction, a new path to our personal growth and development as human beings - emotionally, physically, psychologically, spiritually.  

I think that many of us who have gone through major traumas and loss in our loves - and let's face it, who hasn't - will agree that when years later we look back on those events, we will see that the most difficult and most traumatic events, which at the time shook us up to our very core and brought us to our knees, in the end were seeds for incredible personal change.  I can definitely think of concrete examples of this in my own life - both personal and professional.

Whether one chooses or not to accept and live by the above life philosophy is clearly a personal choice.  And this choice is not a matter of right or wrong.  And I am definitely not here to convince anyone to accept any life philosophy.  

For me, personally, it's a matter of choosing a personal life philosophy that helps me through the most difficult times.  Is this really the way the universe operates, metaphysically speaking, or is it simply something that we convince ourselves of (as the cynics would say), reframing our personal mental attitude and psychological outlook, so that we bring out and activate all of the positive energies and resources we possess to help us get through that most difficult event?  I really don't think anyone knows for sure, and in the end it makes no difference.

I choose to believe.  I believe that everything that happens to us, happens for a reason - and that reason is, ultimately, a positive one.  I believe that the most difficult, complex and challenging life events, are probably the most important and crucial and profound and critical in leading to our personal development - in shaping who we are and the kind of human beings we become.   And, perhaps, if we see all of our life experiences and events, both the good and the bad, as being important, meaningful and there to teach us important lessons,  we can begin to open our eyes and hearts and see the real message behind it all - the beauty, preciousness and... magic of life.