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Medicine Men and Telekinetic Power

Chestertonian gold:

I count no man large-minded or imaginative who has not sometimes felt like a medicine-man.

– G.K. Chesterton, On Man: Heir of All Ages, from In Defense of Sanity, p. 244.

I make my living in a pharmacy. We cycle through a crop of teenage part-time workers every couple of years. I like to ask them whether they consider the pharmacy to be in the business of magic. Think about it: you give people pills as they either get better or they get high; their lives are saved or their lives are ruined. Either the pill does its job or they have an allergic reaction and break out in red dots. If you put that into a fairy tale you’ve got magic. We have been so desensitized to the wonders of daily life that we don’t even see the wonder. When everything is filled with wonder then nothing is wonderful.

I have watched my children go from stationary, to scooting, to crawling, to walking, to running, to roller-skating; I’ve seen them go from gagagoogoo to busting out logical sentences. I remember when they didn’t know what an ‘A’ was, and now my oldest is reading novels. I didn’t say abracadabra, but apparently every word I said was a magic word.

Sometimes, without even thinking, my body just starts doing things – things like typing.

My daughter asks me, How do you type so fast? I just do it.

I learned to do it and now I do it.

But how do you know where are the letters are? They’re out of order.

I don’t know, I don’t think, I just do it.

So simple really. I use a mind that I can’t even locate to invisibly communicate to the ‘memory’ of my fingers (is there actually such a thing as muscle memory? Where can you find it? Do your fingers really even have muscles?) and I just start typing away, 80wpm.Is it telekinetic? If not, then what is it?

If there is anyone with telekinetic power in the audience, please raise my hand; or raise your own.

Perhaps I feel like a medicine man because I am one. But I think I would feel like one even if I wasn’t. You name it, and I’ll tell you there’s something magical about it. Now grow up and be a kid again. Go to a science museum, go to Chuck E. Cheese, to to Toys R Us, go on a nature hike; I don’t care, just do it. Do not come back until you have walked into a pharmacy and sensed the sheer ludicrousness of it all.

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