In Search of the Real Magic
February 26, 2020

     So if you were inclined toward a somewhat cynical turn of mind, your response to my Smokey-the-pony story might run something like, Sure, I'd be a "shit-'n'-pony kinda gal" too, if I got the friggin' flesh-and-blood pony for Christmas.   Such a reaction would miss the point, of course.  Furthermore, and perhaps somewhat ironically, it would miss the point in much the same way that people inclined to more lemons-to-lemonade casts of mind often miss the potential danger lurking in their sunny mental default mode.

     Don't get me wrong: I love me some positive people.  I love me some lemonade.  And I love me some ponies, both real and metaphorical.  People who look for the bright side of things are my people, my tribe.  They're easy to be around, easy to work with, easy to love.  They can perform minor miracles, by turning negatives into positives.  Rain on my outdoor wedding reception?  Fine, we'll all join in a chorus of "Singin' in the Rain " and dance our hearts out in the downpour.  Flat tire on the van this morning?  It was overdue for an alignment check and oil change anyway, so now I get to knock those things off the to-do list.  Out of black tea this morning?  I need to cut back on caffeine anyway, so here's my chance to jump start that effort.

     Okay, so I might actually be a little upset – sad, really –  if I ran out of my English breakfast tea with honey on any given morning.  It's my crutch.  It's my fuel.  It's how I can imagine how difficult it must be to break addictions to harder drugs.  If the thought of giving up my daily three-cups-of-tea makes me this sad (and sends me searching for the Tylenol, for when the headache kicks in later), then I have some inkling of the addict's struggle, and thus some basis, however small, for sympathy with their plight.

     Stop.  That's the move.  That, right there.  Did you see what I just did?  That's how it happens.  That's the mental slight of hand.  Did you see how I turned my negative into a positive?  Did you see how I re-imagined – or perhaps rationalized – my caffeine addiction by re-casting it as a way of understanding the struggles of those addicted to more problematic substances?  

     Now, here's the thing: maybe that's a legitimate move and maybe it's not.  I can hear what feels to me like a legitimate criticism: You don't know jack-shit about addiction, girly, so you can take your tea and sympathy, and your Tylenol, and your mildly narcissistic trivialization of other people's struggles, and stuff it.  

     Point taken.
          
    Here's what I'm getting at: the problem with an unexamined "shit-'n'-pony kinda gal" mode – my natural default mode – is that you risk blinding yourself to real problems in the world, including problems within yourself, which often arise from patterns of pain avoidance, and also (perhaps especially) problems that arise from active malevolence, from evil.  And blinding yourself to such problems leaves you ill-equipped to confront them.  You cannot combat the evil that you refuse to see.  It's one thing to transform or transmute a problem, creatively leveraging it, elevating it as an impetus to find and form a real solution.  But to do that, you have to squarely face the problem, you have to actually understand it on its own terms first.  Anything less than that is merely commuting the problem to another form without really addressing it.  Anything less than that is just slight of hand. It's not real magic.

     But I want the real magic.