Magical Moments

Dear Chemistry Colleagues, 

Let’s face it, life is ordinary much of the time.  We get up, we go through our routine, and we start over the next day.  Much of the time we live ordinary lives.  And this is not a bad thing.  Van Morrison wrote “Ordinary life be my rock in times of trouble, get me back on the earth, put my feet on the ground.”  But there are also magical moments in our lives, even though they are rare.  They often come as small surprises, the best kind.  The other day, I interviewed an incoming student for a graduate program, and it turned out we had a lot of experiences, interests, and people in common.  In a thirty minute meeting, I bonded with a stranger who entered my life.  That was a magical moment.  Recently, one of my students came into my office with new data on a problem she had been working on for several years and found a new behavior—and a very interesting one—that we had been hoping for but frankly had given up expecting.  This was a magical moment.  And I think of another time, long ago, when I sat outside with one of my daughters, when she was a little girl, in the middle of the night with her in my lap wrapped in a blanket and we watched shooting stars.  Another magical moment.  Each of us has little memories like this that take the ordinary and make it sublime.  It’s all the more magical, perhaps, when it is unexpected, when a little gift enters our lives.  My PhD advisor used to say, “You made my day” when we did something extraordinary, or even just a little out of the ordinary.  What a little joy to spread in each of our lives.

Van Morrison also sang in “Days Like This,” “When everything falls into place like the flick of a switch.  Well my mama told me there'll be days like this.”  I watched the Biden inauguration the other day, and I was moved by a number of events.  John Legend sticks in my mind, singing “It’s a new day, It’s a new dawn” and, of course, my favorite, Lady Gaga brought down the house with her singing of the “Star Spangled Banner.”  But the magic moment for me was the unexpected one, when the twenty-two year old poet Amanda Gorman recited from her poem “The Hill We Climb,” “Being American is more than a pride we inherit... It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.”  “There is always a light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.” This magical moment foreshadows a new day where justice, truth, and, yes, science will play the important roles in governing.  We still have a tough year ahead of us, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel—a government that values truth, justice, and science, and an mRNA vaccine to end the pandemic.  My message for 2021 is to be open to that magical moment each day.  Let it find you.  Or better yet, be that moment for someone else.  Tell somebody, “You made my day.”

Best Regards,

Phil