There is a moment I have watched happen dozens of times now, and I still do not fully understand it.
A senior executive — someone whose entire professional identity is built around being composed, analytical, unflappable — watches something happen that they cannot explain. For a fraction of a second, before the rational mind kicks in and starts searching for the mechanism, something else flickers across their face. Their mouth opens slightly. Their eyes go wide. And for one unguarded moment, they look exactly like a child who has just seen something impossible.
Then the moment passes. The professional mask comes back up. They laugh, or they say something clever, or they reach for the object to examine it. But that flicker was real. I saw it. And the person who just experienced it knows they felt something they had not felt in a very long time.
Rachel Carson wrote about this in a book I have returned to more than almost anything else in the past few years. Her central argument in “The Sense of Wonder” is both simple and devastating: children are born with an indestructible capacity for wonder, and adults systematically dismantle it. Not through malice but through the accumulated weight of explanation, categorization, and efficiency. We learn the names of things and mistake the names for the things. We learn how things work and mistake the mechanism for the experience. And gradually, wonder gets crowded out by knowledge — or what passes for knowledge.
Carson was writing about the natural world. Fireflies, tidal pools, migrating birds. But the principle lands differently when you apply it to what happens in a meeting room in Vienna when a consultant who learned magic in hotel rooms does something that should not be possible.
The Adult Bargain
There is a bargain most of us make somewhere in our twenties, though we never consciously agree to it. We trade the capacity for raw experience — surprise, delight, confusion, awe — for competence. Competence is valuable. It pays mortgages. It earns promotions. But it has a cost, and the cost is that the world starts to feel smaller. More predictable. More explicable.
I made this bargain. I was good at it. I spent years as a strategy consultant developing exactly the kind of systematic, analytical thinking that is useful for solving business problems and terrible for experiencing the texture of being alive. When you are trained to immediately decompose any situation into its component parts, you do it automatically, even when the situation is a sunset or a piece of music or a stranger doing something beautiful.
The deck of cards I bought from ellusionist.com around 2016 started to undo that bargain in ways I did not anticipate. Not because of any mystical quality in the cards. Because learning to create wonder forced me to remember what wonder felt like — which required locating it in myself first.
You cannot create an experience in an audience that you have never accessed in yourself. This is one of those things that sounds obvious and takes years to really understand.
What Children Know
Carson’s observation about children is that they do not need to know the name of something to experience it fully. A child watching a crab move across the sand does not think “decapod crustacean navigating intertidal zone.” They think: look at that thing. It is incredible. Watch it go.
The name comes later, if it comes at all. The experience comes first, and it is complete without the name. The problem is that adults have so thoroughly inverted this that we often cannot access the experience until we have the name. We need to categorize before we can feel. We need to understand before we can appreciate.
Magic exploits this inversion. A well-designed effect presents the adult brain with something it cannot categorize. The rational mind reaches for its filing system and finds nothing to file the experience under. And in that gap — that brief moment of category failure — something that was dormant wakes up.
It is not the trick that does this. The trick is just the delivery mechanism. What the trick delivers is an experience of genuine cognitive surprise, which the adult brain has not had in a long time, and which temporarily bypasses all the defensive machinery that normally filters raw experience into something manageable.
The Corporate Room
I do a lot of my performing now in corporate settings — keynotes, off-sites, client events. These are not venues designed for wonder. They are designed for PowerPoint and catering and the careful management of professional relationships. When I bring a piece of mentalism or close-up magic into these rooms, I am introducing a category of experience that was not supposed to be there.
The results are unpredictable in the best way.
The person who is most resistant at the beginning — who folds their arms and says “I know how these things work” — is often the one who reacts most strongly when the resistance fails. Because their walls were higher, the drop is further. The flicker I described at the beginning of this post is most visible in exactly those people.
What I have come to understand is that the resistance is not really about magic. It is about vulnerability. Allowing yourself to be surprised means admitting that you do not have full control over your experience of the world. For people whose professional identity depends on competence and control, that is not a small thing to admit. The arms fold as a preemptive defense.
But wonder does not require permission. That is what makes it powerful and what makes it, ultimately, irresistible.
The Performer’s Side of This
Here is what I do not say enough: the restoration of wonder works on the performer too.
When I am deep in a practice session — trying to get something right, running through it over and over, debugging the timing or the framing or some technical element that is not landing — I am absolutely not experiencing wonder. I am experiencing frustration, focus, and the particular grinding quality of craft work that resists romanticization.
But there are moments during performance when the thing lands in a way that surprises even me. When the effect happens and I see the audience respond and something in me thinks: yes, that. That is what this is supposed to be. Those moments feel like touching something real.
Carson writes that the antidote to the loss of wonder in adults is not instruction but re-exposure. You do not teach someone to feel wonder by explaining it to them. You put them in situations where wonder is possible and get out of the way.
That is, in a strange way, a description of what performance is. You create the conditions. You do the preparation. And then you get out of the way and let the moment happen.
What Magic Gives Back
I have been trying to articulate this for years, and I am still not sure I have it exactly right. But here is my best current attempt:
Magic gives adults permission to not know something without being threatened by the not-knowing.
In professional life, not knowing is a vulnerability. You are expected to know things. Admitting ignorance has consequences. So you fill the gaps, fake the confidence, project the competence. The discomfort of genuine uncertainty gets managed away.
Magic creates a safe container for genuine uncertainty. The audience knows they are being fooled — they just do not know how — and they have implicitly agreed to be in that position for the duration of the performance. Within that agreement, not-knowing is not a failure. It is the point. And in that space, something relaxes that does not get to relax very often.
The executives I work with are not reverting to childhood when that flicker crosses their faces. They are not becoming naive or credulous. They are temporarily accessing a mode of experience that they have not used since childhood — the mode where something can be remarkable simply because it is, before the explanatory machinery kicks in and turns it into something manageable.
The Sense of Wonder Is Not Lost
Carson’s most important point, the one I keep coming back to, is that the sense of wonder is not destroyed in adults. It is suppressed. The capacity is still there. It has just been trained out of active use.
This changes how I think about what I am doing when I perform. I am not bestowing something on an audience that they do not have. I am creating conditions in which something they already have can briefly surface.
That is a more accurate and, I think, more humble description of the job. The wonder is theirs. I am just the person who temporarily lowered the drawbridge.
The executive across the table from me has not lost their capacity to be astonished. They have just built a very professional fortress around it. A good piece of magic does not attack the fortress. It finds the side door that nobody remembered to lock.
I watched a room of forty senior executives go quiet during a piece of mentalism at a company event in Vienna last autumn. Not the polite quiet of people waiting for the presenter to make his point. The actual quiet of people who had stopped thinking analytically and were simply experiencing something they could not explain.
It lasted about four seconds.
Then the room erupted and everyone started talking at once and the fortress went back up.
But for four seconds, forty adults who had spent their careers building walls around their capacity for astonishment had those walls down.
That is what magic can do. And if Carson is right that the sense of wonder is the most important thing we can have — and I think she is right — then the four seconds matter.
They matter quite a lot.