What Magic Means To Me
What magic means to me.
I regularly remind myself that I do magic tricks for a living.
My job is to sit at home (more likely in Gail’s bakery) and think up tricks and presentations to hook, engage, and ultimately “fool” an audience. It is a brilliantly pointless endeavour.
I think Teller (from the iconic duo Penn and Teller) best captures both the silliness and secret of magic tricks with this spectacular line: “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect”.
Whilst I think it is important to take the practice of magic seriously, I think it is also important for magicians to appreciate the ridiculousness of what they do. Undeniably, it’s a delicate balance, and one that is often lost in the pomp of a magician’s ego.
My identity as a person is heavily steeped in magic (perhaps too much so but that’s for another blog) and I spend most of my waking hours thinking about how to improve what I do as well as learn new things (sorry Cara). It is an obsession like no other. My working day never starts and never ends.
PLAY SHOWREEL
A love-hate Relationship
I appreciate the above sounds very romantic, but like most passionate relationships, my life in magic has been littered with extreme highs and extreme lows.
I think this is due to my happiness in magic being a direct reflection of my happiness in life. By asking me if I’m currently enjoying magic, you will inadvertently find out if I’m enjoying my life. The two are inextricably linked.
In my mid /late 20s, my relationship with magic was a fractious one. I often found myself resenting life as a magician. Of course, this feeling had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with issues I needed to address in my personal life.
To stop this blog from becoming a therapy session, I’ll briefly summarise my 20s. I felt like I was constantly holding a beach ball under the water and it was fighting to come up. The effort it took was causing me to drown.
At 30, I lost my grip and the beach ball shot up.
This event sparked the most important turning point of my life (a story for another time) and each one of the last 6 years has been an improvement on the last (of course, not without many difficulties and obstacles along the way).
My point is, that as a result of personal development, my relationship with magic has never been better. I have loved it like a newborn puppy ever since.
Why does magic mean so much to me
There is so much I have learnt from magic (both from the learning of tricks and the pressures of running your own business) but when I summarise what magic means to me, it is hard not to indulge my inner cliché; it is everything.
It is an endlessly odd/entertaining industry to be part of. Magic tricks are breathtakingly clever. The want to learn and improve is insatiable. It inspires the most unique creativity and conversation. It was the introduction to my best friend Neb (a man who arguably deserves a gratitude blog at some point). I never bore of watching it, learning it, and talking about it. I am in awe of it.
If “magic” was a person, it would have a restraining order against me.
Magic as a job
Despite all this, in an ideal world, magic wouldn’t be my “job”. I appreciate that contradicts the above sentiment/weird psycho energy. But bear with me. When something becomes your job, it comes with an inherent pressure to pay your mortgage, file your taxes correctly, learn about things that kill your soul (but are necessary for good business) etc etc.
In some ways, defining it as my “job” cheapens it somehow. It reduces the thing I love to something transactional. If I won EuroMillions tonight, I would wake up tomorrow and still pursue being a magician…I’d just do so with zero compromise. The shackles of “good business decisions” would be smashed…
I think it’s worth caveating all the above by saying I am extremely grateful being a magician is my job. I can’t imagine doing anything else and I regularly take a moment to appreciate that I am very lucky to call what I do “work”.
But, we were talking about an ideal world (or at least, I was)…
Being a Magician
The art of magic (yes, art!) has dipped in and out of my life like a loyal partner for 25 years, and I am so grateful to it. It has forced me to engage with the world around me (often when I’ve least felt like it) and has allowed me to express myself in a more meaningful way than I could possibly have imagined. There is no end goal, no striving for fame, and no 5-year plan. I simply look forward to another 25 years and sincerely hope my last words are “pick a ca-…”.
