The Next Trick

On Miracles, Magic, and the Quiet Return to Ourselves

The holiday season has a way of brushing the world with a strange kind of wonder — lights humming in windows, cold air sharp enough to wake memory, people carrying joy and heaviness in the same breath.

It’s the one time of year when even the most grounded among us become slightly more open to the unseen — a softened doorway in the heart, a quiet hope that something might shift, that an old weight might finally loosen.

We decorate our homes to imitate magic, but the real magic still happens where no one can see — in the places inside us untouched by tinsel, tradition, or noise.

And that’s what this reflection turns toward. Not the spectacle of the season, but the quieter, more enduring miracle: the one that unfolds inside a human being when they break the spell they’ve carried for years and return to the truth waiting beneath it.

We imagine magic as something happening on a stage — a trick, a distraction, an illusion crafted to impress.

And miracles? We imagine them as rare events reserved for the holy or the chosen, meant to shock us into belief.

But the older I get, the more I see that magic and miracles were never separate. And neither was ever about spectacle.

They were meant to awaken us.

The real magic isn’t in bending nature or defying the universe. The real miracle is when a human being finally wakes up from an old story and steps into the one that was always theirs.

That is the next trick.

Not thunder from the sky.
Not a star splitting the night.
Not some cosmic intervention descending like snow.

The miracle is quiet.
Subtle.
Personal.

It happens inside.

The Spell We Don’t Know We’re In

Every person is born into a story — a set of beliefs, wounds, fears, and expectations that shape them long before they’re conscious of having a self.

In some families, the lights of the holidays glow warm and soft. In others, they illuminate fractures that were easier to ignore in summer. Either way, the story we inherit becomes the spell we live under.

It tells us:
“You’re not enough.”
“Don’t feel too much.”
“Don’t be too loud.”
“Don’t be too soft.”
“Your identity is your wound.”
“You will always be this way.”

And people obey these spells without knowing they are obeying anything at all.

That is the tragedy.

But here lies the opportunity:

Spells can be broken.

Miracles Are Not Violations of Nature — They Are Corrections

A real miracle isn’t when nature is overridden — but when a person stops overriding their own nature.

You see it in therapy.
You see it in families gathering for the holidays, old patterns rising like ghosts, someone taking a breath instead of taking the bait.

The blind see — meaning they finally notice what’s been right there.
The deaf hear — meaning they finally receive what was too painful to face.
The lame walk — meaning they finally move toward the life they feared.

These ancient stories were never special effects. They were instructions. They were metaphors for inner movement.

Miracles are what happen when people return to themselves.

When the illusion cracks.
When the old identity loses its grip.
When a person finally whispers,
“I don’t have to keep being who pain told me I was.”

That shift — that’s the miracle.

The Magician Was Never on the Stage

People mistake magic for deception — a clever hand, a distraction, a well-timed misdirection.

But ancient magic was the opposite: the ability to reveal what someone could not yet see.

Not deception.
Clarification.

A good therapist, a wise elder, a trusted friend — these are the real magicians.

Not because they control or impress, but because they help dissolve illusions:

the illusion of worthlessness
the illusion of hopelessness
the illusion that anger is strength
the illusion that shame is identity
the illusion that the past cannot be rewritten

When these illusions fall away, the shift inside feels supernatural — but it isn’t.

It’s natural.
It’s human.
It’s seasonal in the deepest spiritual sense — like winter quietly preparing the roots for spring.

Miracles Today Look Very Ordinary

Miracles today look like:

the man who realizes he doesn’t have to inherit his father’s rage
the woman who discovers she can say no without losing love
the teenager who stops apologizing for existing
the parent who recognizes their fear doesn’t need to become their child’s burden
the person who’s been numb for years finally feeling grief — or joy
the batterer who sees the fracture beneath his violence
the addict who believes — even briefly — they deserve another chance
the person sitting in their parked car after work, choosing a breath over collapse
the lonely person who finally answers the phone instead of disappearing

None of these moments go viral.
None of them shine like holiday lights.

But they are the miracles keeping the world alive.
Because they break spells.
Because they restore vision.
Because they return a person to themselves.

Belief — the Oldest Magic

Belief has been cheapened by cynicism, dismissed as naïve or childish.

But belief is how every transformation begins.

To believe “I can be more than this” is to challenge the architecture of your inherited story.

Belief is not superstition.
Belief is permission.

Permission to outgrow your old identity.
Permission to rewrite the script.
Permission to become someone your past never imagined.

Belief is the first movement of freedom — the quiet miracle before the visible one.

The Next Trick

The next trick isn’t walking on water.

It’s walking away from the patterns that have drowned you for years.

The next trick isn’t turning water into wine.

It’s turning your pain into wisdom, your suffering into compassion, your survival into purpose.

The next trick isn’t raising the dead.

It’s raising yourself from the story that kept you buried beneath shame, fear, or inherited expectations.

That is the miracle.
That is the magic.

The moment you return to your nature and call your soul back from exile.

The moment you remember:

You were never meant to live inside a spell.
You were meant to outgrow it.

And when that happens — quietly, humbly, the way winter light fills a dim room without rushing —

that is the next trick.

— Alextotle