A wager on wonder
2025 may have been the worst year of my life by any external measure. And yet, when I look back, it actually was the best. Somewhere along the way, I stopped waiting for a different existence and fell in love with this one, however messy, imperfect, and unfinished.
I write this from the top of a mountain in Tepoztlan, Mexico. I was last here three years ago. And now, taking stock of my life as the red ball of sun slowly rises above the volcano in the distance, the almost-full moon behind my back, I can’t help but feel profoundly grateful. A few months ago, I couldn’t have done this. For a few weeks, I wasn’t sure if I would ever be able to again. Cancer treatments left me weak, exhausted, and confined to a wheelchair. I moved through the world out of focus.
The route to get to this peak, this lookout, was improvised, scrambling through brush to an unknown destination. Caminante, no hay camino, I thought to myself as I crawled on hands and knees, a line from an Antonio Machado poem, se hace camino al andar. Traveler, there is no path. You make the path by walking.
I remarked to my guide that the place, this mountain, was magical, and he commented back that it is not the place itself that is magic, but rather the reminder that the magic is within us.
That idea has been echoing for me. During my lowest moment in the last few months, alone in the bathroom covered in blood, afraid that the intense hemorrhaging might take my life, I understood how little I could control. And in that space, I clung to meaning, repeating to myself, my peace is my crown, and no one may take it from me. I am sovereign. I am the creator of my world.
I have been thinking ever since about belief, what it does, and what it costs. About what it means to live as though you are magic when the body is failing you. About whether belief is a strategy, or something closer to a posture, a way to hold yourself when certainty collapses.
Over the past year, my own relationship to the notion of ritual, to belief, to magic has shifted. I’ve always believed that the subconscious is more powerful than we tend to acknowledge, and yet we rarely speak to it directly. You see glimmers in dreams received at night, but I’ve become more interested in what it means to stay awake to my inner life, shaping meaning deliberately, and watching the world respond in kind.
I once loved the idea of architecting my life, enriching every moment with symbolism to call in a better future for myself. I still believe there is deep merit here. The world you build, your home, your celebrations, should be congruent with the future self you wish to inhabit. But this year taught me that enchantment isn’t only about manifesting something new. It is about imbuing the life you already have with meaning, even - especially - when it feels impossible.
What steadies me in uncertainty is a whole-hearted belief in my own divinity, in the idea that my life is an active dream made real. This is not to say that belief guarantees healing. The future is not the point. I stay with my pain, curious about what it contains. The outcome itself matters less than what becomes possible once I live from that state of enchantment. I enter a new dimension of life, even if the door to it is illness.
My own life has narrowed and deepened. I move more slowly. I spend more time inside myself. I’ve learned that trying to rush past this experience, to return too quickly to the life I had, keeps me from the strange, unguarded beauty that lives here.
There is a greater meaning, a greater order to my life. Who is to say that cancer is the villain? Who is to say that cancer isn’t the best thing that ever happened to me? To me, it is the greatest gift to reimagine how I wish to live and a test to cement that belief in action.
Last year, my friend Connie said her goal was to live in poetry. The phrase stayed with me. The idea of turning the daily mundane into the surreal and the literary. Our lives don’t need fantastical plots to become fairy tales; they only require a shift of approach and orientation. The same morning could be ordinary, or it could be a scene.
The world doesn’t arrive with meaning attached. A tree is just a tree is just a tree. My cancer is just cells dividing in a way they should not. A cloud is just a cloud. But a world without given meaning is not the absence of meaning itself, but rather an invitation to interpret as you will. The moment you realize no one is coming to tell you what your life is about is the same moment that you realize you get to decide.
I think of Pascal’s Wager. How do you believe in God when you will never know? It’s a question less about religion than about living in radical uncertainty. There may be no god. Ritual may be futile. Magic may not exist. Belief still shapes how we move through the world. The wager is not actually about truth, but rather about how we live.
If magic is real and you live enchanted, you gain everything. If it’s not and you live enchanted, you still live enchanted. In a world where uncertainty is irreducible, I can think of no worse fate than reaching the end without having allowed life to feel magical.
From the mountain, as I begin the descent, my legs shake. The path is uneven, and I anchor against a root as the gravel shifts underfoot. I place my weight carefully and keep walking.
Thank you as always for reading! As always, I appreciate your sharing and passing my words along!
And come join us in the chat!
I’d love to hear about anything you used to see as ordinary that you now see as a sign, or any other ways you are enchanting your life.
