Magic in the Mundane

Embracing Intersubjectivity and the Profound Beauty of Unexplainable Moments

In the culture that I was brought up in — the late-modern, western culture governed by capitalism and rationalism — everything that cannot be explaining rationally is mostly cut out of daily life.

Even a celebration like Christmas has been deprived of magic and spirituality and degraded to an abundance of hands-on items like gifts, food, and drink. The myths of our ancestors that would explain the inexplicable elements of life and death are mostly viewed as nonsense. And actually, once I left that way of thinking, physically, by moving thousands and thousands of kilometers away from my home country to a different culture, I could feel that I had gotten used to it; that I too had become rather rational and logical in my approach to life.

For example, I have on many occasions experienced my youngest son reading my mind. One afternoon when I was walking down the streets in Copenhagen with him, I looked up at the windows of an apartment I went to see when we were once house hunting. As we passed the building, I was thinking about the atmosphere of the rooms in the apartment and revisiting the dining room with my mind’s eye (which was a very unique, beautiful oval room with wall and ceiling stucco).

Suddenly my little boy, who was three years old at the time said, “That was a nice room,” and I was like, “Excuse me?!”

Afterward, I explained it by telling myself that I was probably thinking aloud, but I really wasn’t.

This has actually happened on several other occasions; if I have been thinking about someone that I like or dislike, he has at times suddenly said something about that person out of the blue, like, “That wasn’t very nice of him,” or “When should we see her again?” But I have always justified these incidences as coincidences. It felt like something forbidden, or too strange to embrace the magic and wonder—the unfathomable dimensions of the world. However, actually, what my youngest son and I experienced in those moments of alignment and interconnectivity is a good example of intersubjectivity, which, because we are still (almost physically) united is intertwined with our subjectivity.

Due to my inexplicable experiences and half-hearted attempts to explain them rationally, it was with great marvel and awe that I experienced the introduction-days at the Green School, Bali, which my children now attend.

They were packed with stories on magic, beautiful incense-filled welcoming ceremonies, and water blessings as well as introductions to topics like “social and emotional intelligence” and “DEAR” (Drop Everything and Read) — daily mindfulness moments initiated by the school gong as well as full moon ceremonies.

In order to experience magic, however, as well as beauty — which is an important ability when cultivating our capability to tune into our intuitive compass — we have to be open to it. We are all capable of having magical unifying, edifying, beauty experiences. Consider the magical universe of the child (of each child), but somewhere along the path to adulthood most of us have unlearned how to feel immediately connected to the world and how to experience magic.

And perhaps it is exactly that detachment, which leads to unsustainable behavior and overconsumption?

We can, however, exercise and cultivate our ability to be receptive to magic and interconnectivity, but it requires an open mind and a wish and ability to acknowledge the irrationality and inexplicability of some phenomena. If we want to be in control of everything by being able to explain everything, we lose something important; we lose the ability to have sudden bursts of irrational meaningfulness flow through our bodies and souls and the beauty of instantly feeling aligned with and connected to our surrounding world.