where's the magic?

This post is born out that feeling you get every birthday when, undoubtedly, someone asks: "so, do you feel any older?" And, just like every other year (which is why this question is always the. most. annoying.), the answer is no. Of course not.

When I was 10, I thought 20 was the stuff moms were made out of. GROWN UP MATERIAL. Finely, aged cheese. Marriage and wisdom and all that other stuff we're supposed to have. I never really thought about those four short (so short, mind-bendingly short) years that separated the high school babes from the marriage makin' mamas. You emerge from college and... that's when the magic happens.

Here's what I'm asking: where's the magic? Because I honestly feel like I haven't changed a bit. I still feel 19 and 15 and 12. I'm so many little girls, year after year, and yet, somehow, I'm also a woman? (Woman is still a mouthful that I don't feel ready to claim)

I'm no grown up and I've realized recently that there will never be a moment where I feel ready to say "okay, I'm an adult now." Sure, it would help if I moved out of my parents' basement, got a dog of my own, made a baby someday, but in my heart of hearts, I will always just be me, experiencing the world and changing so subtlety that I don't even notice I'm different.

I guess I just always thought, as a kid and even as a teenager, that there would be this moment (see: magic) where I would just feel transformed. I would know stuff. I would be confident and successful and changed. I thought that stuff just sort of happened. But it doesn't. You don't become anything, you make choices everyday or things happen that shift the light ever so slightly. Seconds become minutes become days become years. We are the repetition of everyday. We've had infinite moments, but none of them suddenly reform us. I mistake life as being fast. Life is slow and it works like an ooze.

I think about the magic in different ways, mostly when I imagine other people's lives. It's so easy to forget the slow process, the endless days upon days upon years, that creates what you see. Hard work, people! It is the painful, frustrating, fearless faithfulness that creates success. I always think of what I see as what has always been. But people pave the paths to the things they love, and it's never, ever easy. We can never see what lies before us, but courageous people push forward, they keep working, no matter how many tables they have to wait on or how many unpublished, terrible poems lie in their nightstand drawers.

Basically, there is no magic, not in the perfect sense. There is only hard work and lots of minutes.

Some days in my life seem endless, others fly by, but many seem pointless. I used to do a lot of waiting and planning and imagining a future I never really reached for. I was forgetting about all those birthday mornings, feeling the same, being the same as yesterday. There's no one moment, there's no magic slipper. Time will not make it easy (it will always be difficult) but it will give you a place to start, a space to stop waiting.