Magical Thinking

In 2007, when I bought tickets for the Broadway show, The Year of Magical Thinking, staring the inimitable Vanessa Redgrave, and written by Joan Didion, I thought I’d signed on for an entertainment trifecta. Didion and Redgrave, luminaries of literature and stage, and magic!

At the time, I didn’t understand the term, magical thinking. I thought, I love magic! So do most people. Aren’t we primed from an early age to believe in leprechauns, fairies, elves, Santa? We take every opportunity to make a wish. When we spy the fist star, pull on a wishbone or blow out candles on a birthday cake, we toss one off, and though we don’t expect the wish will come true, we want to believe.

Imagine my dismay when I cried through the play and emerged from the theater a sniveling, red-nosed mess. In Didion’s story, she and her husband go to the hospital to visit their daughter, who’s in a coma, in intensive care.  When they get home, he drops dead at the dinner table. Throughout the play, while the mother ruminates on grief, the daughter is on the cusp of death. I know you’re wondering, like I did, where the magical thinking comes in.

Magical thinking is the belief that wishing can change reality. Lucky charms, rituals, places, clothing and myriad tangible and ethereal symbols can serve as instruments of magical thinking. We also believe certain avoidance techniques can exempt us from bad luck. Avoid the crack, save your mother’s back!

According to an article in Psychology Today, we engage in magical thinking because we’ve evolved that way, and because our brain chemistry encourages it with a dopamine rush. And experiments suggest that if we believe we’re in possession of some lucky entity or element, our performance improves. Ask a baseball player.

People who never engage in magical thinking, the literature suggests, are probably severely depressed. On the other hand, too much magical thinking might invite a diagnosis of Schizophrenia. Most of us are in a healthy place on the continuum.

We carry our rabbit’s feet or four-leaf clovers, hang our horseshoes, cross our fingers, and avoid walking under ladders. If the good luck never comes, or the bad arrives instead, we don’t lose faith and throw away our lucky talismans or relinquish our rituals, because we know there’s no actual cause and effect relationship between our intervention and the outcome.

Help yourself to a dose of magical thinking. It can’t hurt, and it might just help. As Thomas Mann asked, “Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle, the Word?”