Everything's eventual

or, fear and growth and ruminating on wonder

UPDATE:

Terry Freedman

generously let me write a follow-up guest article to this, which can be found here:

The magic of magic

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I’m sat in Terminal 4 of Perth’s airport, Western Australia, returning from a long weekend away for my niece’s wedding. A drained coffee and half eaten meal keep me company as the tannoy pierces the calm that my mind so very much wants to locate. Nearby, a man has ordered an entire jug of beer for himself. Mullets and hi-vis vests abound. It’s WA, after all. Mining country. The home of fly-in, fly-out. It’s also beautiful country. Vast country. It’s taken me half a day just to get back to the airport, and I’m still a 3hr flight from being home in Melbourne.

As I sit pondering the optimal arrangement of these words, the clak of keys, the pulse of caffeine, the phrase everything’s eventual resurfaces.

It’s been simmering in my mind, what I want to write. I’m going to spoon some of it out.

This will be a short(ish) but mildly serious post, I suppose. No dreams here. No meteorites in the sky. I’m not even sure I should write this one. But, you know, cadence and all that. What I mean is, I’m not sure that it’s worth writing. I’m going to write it, though. You can read, if you like. That’d be very nice of you.

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The view from our house in the aptly named Cosy Corner, nestled down in the Great Southern of Western Australia. Those dots be roos. The wedding was atop the low hill in the distance.

The wedding was stunning, a celebration of all the kinds of things it was always going to be, with love and laughter and friends, all set upon a backdrop of the Southern Ocean at the very southern tip of WA. It was also a massive party. Hello Sunday hangover. Hello Sunday wine tour.

My wife was emcee, carrying us through the night with her gifted panache and beauty. (Hello, darling, if you’re reading … I’ve put that little compliment there not as a means to see if you read any of my writing, but more as a means to see if you read any of my writing 😉.)

But that’s all an aside, an entrée of information.

So why the (sub)title?

Growing up I was the nerdy kid, the geeky one that wasn’t any good at sports. I wasn’t ever bullied, but I can’t say I cruised by with any sense of self-confidence. Nor did I ever locate the solution to that classic and timeless affliction that affects precious few of us at school still: blushing-when-a-girl-speaks-to-you-to-or-smiles-at-you-or-just-asks-to-borrow-a-pencil.

So it may have been an inevitable door I slipped through in some part of my teenage years, one that creaked open to let me through whilst others rushed by not noticing the symbols etched onto that wooden frame. The dust on the mantle. The promise laced within that dust.

Through that door was a world of—and honestly this feels awkward even to write because I know it’s not going to capture what this means to me, and now I’ve just massacred this sentence by breaking it and this is running on for so long now that where was this meant to be going? (and that’s probably my inner intention anyway)—card magic.

Card magic. It sounds naff writing that. It doesn’t capture the essence of what 52 playing cards arranged in infinite combinations can mean. What they mean to me.

Cards are also profoundly lovely things, such as this deck by Art of Play. I’ve no affiliation, but the curious can find them here: https://www.artofplay.com/products/hmnim

I dropped into a wondrous wormhole of theory and sleights and mechanics and nuance and psychology, endless hours of practice and passion that burst from me with enthusiasm and a sheer love of the wonder and all it can elicit. Bad magic is bad, awful, cringe. Good magic takes you places that aren’t possible by any other means. You can break the wary; you can enchant the sceptical; you can laugh and share in seeing it happen and knowing that you helped create a moment of joy at the impossible. And there’s a distinction there, I think: as the performer, you helped create it, but you weren’t solely responsible. That’s part of what separates the good from the cringe.

And I started performing semi-professionally. A little at first, but then it grew, and by the years of my PhD I was gigging on weekends and earning a tidy side income. It was perfect. It was a love affair with what was possible with a box of the seemingly mundane.

But then I let it go.

I stopped.

For reasons that would require an essay of introspection, I let go of this beautiful gift—and I'm calling it that, acknowledging that it's OK to call it a gift, I think, I hope—and it drifted and perhaps fled to find someone else.

It hurt, I realise. That loss. I shied and hid from what I let go of, never doing anything about it.

Eventually, luckily, thankfully, some years ago I refound my love and passion for this ancient of arts. But though I would do little bits here and there to some friends, I never had that confidence of those gigging years. I was too wary to stuff up or embarrass myself, to not achieve what I once had. And I know that the reason was exactly that: I was once capable of being up there, soaring, and so I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to find those wings again. Or that if I did, they’d be broken or pinioned.

So I beat myself up for not even trying.

But a year ago—and there are too many buts in this post, but my flight is leaving soon and I’m not going to edit this much—I was asked by my niece whether I could do close-up magic at their wedding. I said yes. I forced myself to say yes. (OK, so there may have been some whisky involved that swayed my tongue.) I had to. To say no would be to give in to cowardice that had gripped me for too long, and I couldn’t do that anymore.

So I said yes and, with the turning of time, that wedding just rolled around. And I performed. I walked and talked and jazzed magic for hours to guests—some I knew, many I didn’t—and I accepted that all I could give was what I could give, and though I was nervous, I embraced it, leant into it, letting it fuel me and the small wonders of that evening.

I only helped create those wonders. Everyone else did the rest.

///

And that Everything’s eventual up there? It’s a silly thing. This time a week ago I was sat at my desk thinking, “well, this time next week, you’ll know whether it went well or whether it didn’t, but regardless, you’re going to do it, because soon enough you’ll be on the other side of it and when you reach that side, you’ll know you’ll have grown, even if just a little.”

This morning, before I left, before anyone was awake, I watched the mists roll into the valley as the sun crept across the land. It was gorgeous. Utterly magical. As I stood there, I was at peace knowing that now, on the other side of it, I had grown, even if just a little. That even though I’m a different person now to all those years ago, whether there’s a broken wing or one that has healed, I had forced myself back to a place I had once found so easily and I had welcomed it, momentarily. And that was enough.