Have you ever felt magic in your life? When I met my sister at a trailhead, we’d often pull up at the exact same time. Often, when I’m filling my pill container with vitamins, I’ll dump exactly seven out without counting. I’ve texted a friend about something exactly when they were going to text me about the same thing.

It feels like the universe is all coming together to get you exactly what you want.

But there’s more to it than magic. I recently watched this video about four-leaf clovers. The world record holder has a magical ability to find four-leaf clovers. Except it really isn’t magic: she’s done it so much that it is simply a skill she’s developed.

Magic isn’t something special that happens to you. The universe doesn’t have unknowable magic. Sometimes things work out, but sometimes they don’t. People make choices; things happen, regardless of what you want. But there is an ability to foster a sense of magic or serendipity. This comes from intuitively acting on a base of knowledge, experience, and reflection.

Intuition that feels like magic only comes after participating in active learning. The reason I can show up at the trailhead at the exact same time as my sister is that I use GPS directions to get timing and I know her habits. I can get a good feel of when we’ll show up at the same time from past experience and the knowledge I look up. It requires some study and practice. Other experiences are similar: it’s things I’ve done many times, and I learn from past experiences.

New experiences are not magical. They are hard. It’s a learning phase, where you don’t have much experience to draw from. To get it to feel magical, you need to engage in active learning so you have that experience to draw on.

Active learning requires learning from others, trying it out, and reflecting on how it went. If it’s a new experience, you can use related experiences to start somewhere above zero. Active learning is finding the patterns in something so you can recognize them more easily later. Active learning leads to experience, which leads to intuition, and that can result in magic in your life.

So sometimes in life, things feel pretty magical, but it’s more a matter of being able to draw from past experience and active learning to gain that feeling. Other times, I would like an experience to feel magical, but the situation is new and challenging. I have to put in the time to learn and gain experience before it’s going to feel magical.