Make each day more magical with this simple spell

In which memories of the Good Old Days inspire me to live in the moment

This is my “other boyfriend,” Paddi. More about him later. He does not join us at the pub, but I kind of wish he could.

The pub was our Friday-night safe haven. It was the light at the end of the tunnel after a long week. In good weather, we could walk the half mile from my house to downtown, giving ourselves a few extra minutes to savor the anticipation of arrival. Walking through the door felt like crossing a finish line. It was as if the threshold was a magical portal guarded by a bouncer who turned our stress away at the velvet rope. 

In those days, the pub really was the place where everyone knew our names. One of the bartenders — Michelle or Chris or Michael — would make eye contact over the heads of people milling around waiting for seats. We’d give a wordless nod, and a moment later, they’d pass our drinks through the crowd. From there, the evening would unfurl around conversations with friends and acquaintances, a shared order of steak fries (so good!), and the quiet joy of feeling the challenges of the work week evaporate into nothing.  

And then, along with the rest of the world, we woke up one morning to a reality in which a night at the pub could, very literally, kill you. 

We stopped going to the pub. We stopped going anywhere. 

Four years later, we’re back, but it’s not the same. 

A lot happened over those years. The place is still the same — same location, same decor, same menu — but the ownership, staff, and clientele are different. We still enjoy an evening there, but it’s not “our place” anymore. 

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Change is inevitable. What made us sad was realizing that we never fully appreciated what we had until it was gone. 

It’s so easy to take things for granted, or not even notice them at all.

Most days, life hustles us along at a breakneck speed and puts so many demands on our already-distracted brains that it’s a miracle if we manage to be truly present for even a few minutes. I mean, how many times have you driven a familiar route only to reach your destination with no recollection of how you got there? It’s a little scary.

Our lives are full of blind spots that keep us from truly seeing or appreciating what’s right in front of us. 

We enjoyed our Friday nights at the pub, but over time we came to take for granted the things that really made them special. We assumed that the same people would always be behind the bar and on the stools next to us. We assumed that the place would always feel like a home away from home at the end of a long week — a place where we could run into people we knew and enjoy impromptu conversations that would never happen anywhere else. 

We didn’t realize it could all be gone, just like that. 

We weren’t paying enough attention, and we missed the opportunity to really savor the magic of those moments while we were living them.

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It’s easy to miss the magic, but it’s always there. 

It’s not just a night out at your favorite watering hole, an exotic vacation, or special birthday celebration. You can encounter magic when you see a sharp crescent moon hanging in the sky while you’re dragging the trash barrel to the curb early in the morning, when you catch the scent of early lilacs while walking your dog, or when you hear the sound of the neighbor kids joyfully playing while you wash the dishes in front of an open window. 

The magic is always there. We just need to stop long enough to recognize it. 

In his book, Embers — One Ojibway’s Meditations, Native American author Richard Wagamese writes this: 

Standing in the early morning chill, clearing the car of snow, scraping ice from the windows, I look up and around me at a morning filled with things to see: the way the ice fog magnifies the mountain in the near distance so that it appears closer, the ballet of cat tracks in the snow, the bare trees like arterial networks in the dimness, the house slumped like a great sleeping bear under the white rug of winter. It occurs to me that the secret of fully being here, walking the skin of this planet, is to learn to see things as though I were looking at them for the first time, or the last. Nothing is too small then, too mundane, too usual. Everything is wonder. Everything is magical. Everything moves my spirit … and I am spiritual. 

Wagamese reminds us to look at familiar things with fresh eyes. He encourages us to look past the assumptions that become blindfolds, keeping us from seeing the wonder that is all around us. Familiarity may not always breed contempt, but it can make things — even things we love — invisible. 

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There are still plenty of times when I crawl into bed at the end of a long day and can barely recollect what happened, never mind whether I encountered any magic. Hell, there are entire weeks that come and go in a blur, like a car driving the opposite direction on the highway — whoosh, and gone. 

But there are moments when Wagamese’s first/last practice pops into my head and reminds me to pause, take a breath, and really take in what I’m experiencing in the moment — not just what my senses capture, but also how I am feeling and whatI am thinking. Sometimes, this can feel, quite literally, like shifting into a lower gear  that slows down time. 

When I was a kid, my parents gave me riding lessons at a local stable. Four decades later, I am back in the saddle, and lucky enough to still be training with the incredibly knowledgeable woman who first taught twelve-year-old me how to convince a thousand-pound animal to allow me to remain on its back. The horse I ride belongs to the school. His name is Paddi. He's a nice Irish boy whom I often refer to as “my other boyfriend.” 

Paddi is twenty-nine years old, which is about eighty-five in horse years. He is no spring chicken.

I do not know how many lessons I have left with Paddi. The old man will have to retire one of these days, and then our working partnership will be at an end. I don’t dwell on this sad reality, but I do let it inspire me to be intentional about bringing the first/last mindset to our time together. From grooming and tacking up to riding to grazing him after a lesson, I do my best to be truly present and to feel a deep appreciation for the experience in the moment. I think about how lucky I am to be able to give myself the gift of continuing to ride, how grateful I am to have such a lovely and trustworthy horse as my partner, and how fortunate I am to be able to learn from such a patient and skilled instructor. And I take time to notice all the incredible natural beauty that surrounds me at the barn: rolling green hills, a gorgeous wide sky, swooping swallows and singing starlings, pockets of wildflowers, and the lovely scents of grass and hay. 

Sometimes, when Paddi and I are taking a moment to relax and bask in the afterglow of doing an especially good job in our lesson — he munching juicy mouthfuls of grass and clover and dandelions, me inhaling the sweet smell of his sun-warmed hide — it’s so magical, I can hardly believe it’s real. 

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P. S. If you missed it, this week’s Monday Moxie provides musical accompaniment for pondering being present in the moment.

Monday Moxie — Someday soon, your whole life’s gonna change

P.P. S. Because you’ve been nice enough to read all the way to the end, here are a few more pictures of the handsomest horse in the world.