Remember when you were young and you used to count down the days until Christmas and your birthday?
Remember that feeling? It’s my birthday soon and I’ve been trying to recreate this sense of giddy excitement in anticipation.
It seems to be very possible just to create this feeling if you’re willing to…
How would your life change is you felt like that on a regualt basis?
Do you have magic moments in your life?
A magic moment is anything you really, really enjoy. A cool conversation with a stranger. Someone smiling at you for no reason. Sitting down to your favorite show with your favorite snack and just thinking, life is good.
We have to record our magic moments.
And I don’t mean pulling your phone out and filming yourself having a good time. I mean starting a list somewhere, a note on your phone, whatever works for you. So much happens every single day in our lives that our brains simply cannot store all of it. What we want to do is train our brain to remember the things that were actually good.
Because here’s the thing: your life is just a collection of memories.
If that collection is made up of the hard things, the tough moments, the stuff that dragged you down, then you’re going to feel like you’ve had a hard life. But if you start recording the awesome little moments you genuinely loved, you’re training your brain to notice them. You start unpacking your week and suddenly you’ve got ten, twenty of these magic moments sitting there.
And what happens if you keep doing that every single week, for a whole year?
You end up with a whole list of awesome stuff.
We have to record these things. Otherwise, we’re just going to forget them.
You MUST track them. Write them down, take note, reflect, record, remember.
It might not feel like you’ve had any ‘magic’ moments this past week, but I guarantee if you take 5 minutes to ask the question, you’ll find some.
That unexpected moment with a stranger.
The smile from your friend.
That moment you cracked up laughing.
If you don’t track them you’ll definitely forget them. But the moment you’ve noted it and remembered it, your perception of your life begins to shift…
Suddenly you see it’s full of these little moments you love. And after all, a life well lived is nothing more that a collection of a million little moments you love.
Don’t short change yourself.
Record your magic moments.
Goodness, he’s good isn’t he?
And I think its more than just being a nice guy.
His entire orientation on Grand Designs is one of awe and possibility.
He meets people in the very moment of potential- the moment before the birth of their building.
The word ‘build’ captures what he does perfectly. He’s all about building; building people up, building excitement, pleasure in architecture and building a connection between us watching at home and the brave souls on the journey to create their home.
Long live Kev!
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
| “This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.” |
| -George Bernard Shaw |
It’s important to catch them…
The magic moments.
We spend so much time working, aspiring and perspiring toward outcomes. When the awesome moments happen it’s so easy to move on quickly.
I have a dated database in Notion called “Magic Moments”.
When a cool little thing happens, I put it in there- the date is already added.
It’s the best thing in the world to read back over these and be flooded by all the good:
-The stranger who smiled at me on the bus
-The unexpected sunset view from the hotel window
-That apple that was so great and crunchy.
They come and go so quickly you might miss them. Get in the habit of recording them, you won’t regret it.
“I believe if there’s any kind of God, it wouldn’t be in any of us. Not you, or me…but just this little space in between,”
–Céline, Before Sunrise
There’s a belief I’ve battled with in the past that if we make learning fun, it undercuts the seriousness of the subject.
Whenever I have an internal conflict like this I always come back to outcome. What is this really about? What are we trying to do?
Well with the learning I deliver, my big bold outcome is to bring it to life for the kids. Words can also betray us a bit here, because you hear a word like ‘fun’ and that might conjure images of a hectic classroom, a ball bouncing off a window and no one listening to each other.
So maybe the word ‘fun’ isn’t the right word.
What I’m really looking for is life.
There is life in a kid’s eye when they are transfixed by a giant digger doing construction next door. There is life in their eye when they notice an adult is in a bad mood. And there is indeed life when they are learning something they love.
The only thing that can trivialise learning is a trivial intention.
If you’re looking to make ‘fun’ of something, yeah you’re probably going to be a bit disrespectful.
If you’re looking to bring something to life, though? Well now you’re playing a game I like. And there are a million and one ways to bring something to life. There are quiet ways, big ways, busy ways and gentle ways.
Let’s take seriously our job to create vibrant, living connections to the learning we share.
That sounds fun to me
The brain and the heart.
The craft and the trance.
The mathematician and the magician.
Sometimes it seems like experience can be one or the other. Sometimes each minute accounted for and other times experience washes over you in a never-ending instant.
I’m guilty of spending a lot of time as the mathematician, in a world of graphs and exacts… but how great that we are constructed with infinity inside us too.
Don’t forget to let it all go (sometimes). There’s magic in both, sure, but only when you let both co-exist.
