Forgetting What is Petty

A few months ago I went to Reimer’s Ranch with SIRA, a park near Dripping Springs. This was my first time doing anything with the organization and looking back, I regret not taking more of an advantage of such a group. It was a fairly small group of whom, for me, were fellow southwestern students whom I had not met a single one. The exception was a woman who I had told off in one of my classes a few years back—well, told off is a bit of an understatement—there were words thrown around. She was in a group project and didn’t do a thing. And when I say that, I do mean precisely that, not even showing up to our meetings. And so it was a bit of an awkward situation, for it was fairly clear that we both remembered this event. There was added awkwardness for we each held each other’s lives in our hands—you see, this was my first time going outdoor rock climbing, and I assure you, it is a horse of a different color. If you fall, there is nothing locking you in place. If the belayer is not paying close enough attention, the rope can slip through the tiny piece of metal and not stop until you hit the ground thirty feet below. And there’s no pad to land on, no rubber of foam—you’ve got dirt and rocks to pick from. So here I was, halfway up a cliff, with this woman, whom, I’ll admit, I rather passive-aggressively called a few names from a distance, controlling my fate. It’s hard for me to explain why exactly, but it actually felt pretty wonderful. There’s something about moving past petty differences, especially when it’s on a scale of life and death. Placed in such a situation, literally looking back down at the ground, it makes you realize what is important. Sure, there is always safety gear, but that is irrelevant, or at least it seems like it when you’re up there.
On this trip, I also realized that the guy leading it had, what I consider to be, the perfect job. He works for Georgetown Parks and Rec and also teaches an FRA on campus, which I plan to take when offered. There was something about the guy that was entirely genuine, which was fairly refreshing. He was clearly just doing what he loved to do, and intensely passionate and happy because of it. There has always been a part of me that has hesitated with coming to terms with potentially and actually having a job like this. I think ultimately, it revolves around a fairly outdated and superficial notion of prestige, which this trip helped me get past.

Magician

The magician from Austin College who came to speak just didn’t, well, he didn’t wow me. The part of the show in which he preformed magic was a waste of time. Card tricks are inherently boring, and indeed, this cuts at the core of what magic is—the second half of his schtik, to use a Yiddish word. He was arguing that magic is more than merely a matter of perception, bringing it into the everyday by calling on the philosopher Giordano Bruno. The problem with performance magic lies in the fact that ultimately, you are aware that it is merely a matter of perception. One does not even need to know precisely how the trick was done. The fact of the matter is that the magician tricks you somehow, by not allowing you to perceive the whole truth of what is going on. Hiding a deck of cards under a handkerchief is, in this sense, a dead giveaway that something important is going on underneath it. The magician himself was providing a stumbling block for our sense of sight. While we perceived it as an added difficulty for the performance of the trick, what we are not thinking of is the incredible amount of practice that must have gone into that routine. He must have spent days practicing it, getting it damn near perfect. This is why, ultimately, I was confused to why he preformed stage magic at all—he seemed to be reinforcing negative definitions for what he wanted magic to mean.
The bit of the everyday magic was fairly fast and loose. The word magic has a connotation that is more than natural phenomenon that we do not understand or that appears on the surface level as mystifying, and yet that is precisely the definition that he wanted to give it. Here, the example of calming a baby down is fairly easy to answer if one wishes to bring in evolutionary psychology. And indeed, I felt like much of what he was arguing could be answered with a throughout study of human psychology. Why is there not a department of magic, as he so eagerly asked? Well, for starters, I think it would come into conflict with the pre-existing one of psychology. That being said, there is are element within such a study that can be extrapolated. Why, for example, do we wear our favorite team jersey on game day? One typically refers to it as superstition, but there is this entirely irrational element within the fan’s mind that if I didn’t wear it the team would definitely have lost, if they had. If they hadn’t and one wasn’t wearing the jersey, one puts the issue out of mind typically. If they had won and the fan was wearing the jersey, well, “see, look at how my support helped win—I too am a loyal fan—I was the cause of their victory, even.” We do revert to thought that could be placed within the realm of magic on occasion, but such thought can be placed within the study of human behavior in general.