The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

What are you doing today?

As our holiday was a few days back, today I'm relishing the rewards of being...well...irregular. Susan and I gave each other a Miyazaki 12 Pack (Castle in the Sky/Kiki's Delivery Service/Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind/Porco Rosso/Princess Mononoke/Spirited Away/The Cat Returns/Howl's Moving Castle/My Neighbor Totoro/My Neighbors the Yamadas/Pom Poko/Whisper of the Heart) because magic is important and Miyazaki is a master of it.

We watched My Neighbor Totoro earlier today and wept at the sheer beauty of it.

Right now I'm listening to Van Morrison's Moondance album, smoking a pipe (normal tobacco although a special blend I make up at my tobacconist), sipping a Pelligrino, scanning some books I purchased (Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility, Human Life, Action and Ethics, The Structure of Thinking, On the Shore of Nothingness, Village Democracy, Self and Society. Considering my reading list, you might want to stop here) and wondering at the nature of magic and how our minds have changed it over the years.

Humans are the only ones who will, in the course of a lifetime, go into a hostile environment and bust their guts to make it habitable. This is terraforming without leaving the planet.

But humans are still animals.

Creatures will go into a hostile environment over time. Over a long, long time. Centuries if not millenia. They turn hostile environments into habitable ones by adapting themselves to the requirements of the new hostile environment. This is called evolution.

And watching My Friend Totoro I got to wondering about magic.

Christmas is a time of magic to Christian children and to parents able to see through childhood eyes perhaps. There is "m"agic and there's "M"agic. I don't know if people in the Apostolic Era believed in magic per se, they certainly believed in the miraculous and the two overlap only in the "m"agic sense.

Anthropology and its siblings tell us that much of humankind's history consisted of a strong belief in "M"agic. We still believe in "M"agic in many ways. We simply know it by the name of one of its siblings, science. People who've heard me in presentations know that science is merely another set of beliefs albeit a set that's more convenient in most of today's societies.

But there was a time when "M"agic was the science of the day and it was as firmly provable as fact in its day as our cellphone systems today. Adults believed in it, not just children. So why is it that today (usually) only children can experience "M"agic and (usually) they stop experiencing it somewhere between 3-5 years of age, definitely by 8-10 years of age.

Well, I got to wondering if humans, in their quest to reshape their environment rather than reshape themselves, got caught up in evolution's inevitable rules whether they meant to or not.

I got to wondering if in reshaping their environment they did reshape themselves. More specifically, did they unintentionally reshape their minds? One of my favorite sayings is "Nature bats last and owns the stadium". I know that Nature always wins in the end and the only way to come out ahead is to obey the rules she sets down at the beginning.

So I wonder if humankind's loss of the ability to experience "M"agic is due to our unintentionally obeying one of Nature's laws; your environment will always shape you, internally and externally, whether you want it to or not.

Humans intentionally reshape their environment to suit their needs. Perhaps that reshaped environment doesn't need humans who believe in and are capable of "M"agic and has turned the card on us?

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