When is magic magic?

It's a rational world that we live in. Everything gets explained somehow and mysteries are assumed to have solutions we will eventually discover. As a scientist, I can understand that as a framework in which to do business, but at the same time it formalises mystery and the unknown into some discrete quality. It robs everything of magic.

What is magic? Drawing just on today, magic is standing by the sea and talking to oneself, or watching and listening to tonight's band in the Prom Bandstand. Magic is seeing a wave foam up to within a centimetre of your feet but not quite reaching, before swarming your position on the next attempt. Magic is an instantaneous quality, a throbbing in the fabric of space-time that can't be quantified. As a mathematician that should be anathema but really I quite like it.

The world of nature, of the environment at large, is large and chaotic and impossible to ever fully understand. That's what makes it special. Carrying on from our most distant intelligent ancestors we supernaturalise it, and enjoy it for the stories it conceals and the marvels it contains. It is not to be imagined that someone can walk down a beach and not have poetic or lyrical thoughts, or that the relaxation they seek will elude them. Or in a forest, or alongside a river, or on a grassy hillside.

For millennia people have been returning to nature in attempts to shed worldly concerns and for brief periods be meditative and happy. It's invaluable, and that deeply held attachment to nature, to the natural world, is something so primitive that it cannot help but be supernaturalised or spiritualised. It's sacred in the human sense not the more specific religious manner. We shed our worries at the door and go out to be happy.

So, what can we make of all this? For most of civilized history people have been drifting away from their roots, from the environment, and that dislocation has resulted in stresses and miseries, and hordes of diseases and malnutritions and things even worse. It would be impossible for us all to retreat to the country and walk around the woods and prowl the coastlines but we can make our day to day lives easier. It may sound stupid, but you can lean on that tree for a moment, or walk home along the river, or even lie down in the park at lunchtime.

You never know, you may find a piece of magic?

O.