Finding magic in the mundane is a principle I believe in, and people throughout history have, too.

In the modern world, when we think about moments of genuine awe, they’re usually accompanied by thoughts of incredible sights we’d have to travel to see, wildly popular events we need to buy tickets for, or admiring fantastic art in a museum.

But rarely do we think that things from our mundane day-to-day routine can spawn true awe or magic moments. The incredible seems to be a thing or experience somewhere out there that we need to go find (or buy).

So, because of that, I want to point out a bit of magic I know you’ve experienced at some point today: walking through a doorway.

Talk about mundane, right?

What’s incredible about walking through a doorway, especially as you either enter or exit a building, is the transformation that happens in the in-between. I’ll give an example that I’m sure you can relate to:

That moment you walk through your front door after being at your job for eight hours.

Your role there is not the same as your role at home, and how you act there is not the same as how you act at home. So, as you walk through the door, you transform from the “at work” version to the “at home” version. This is a mini daily version of the state of liminality.

“State of Liminality” usually refers to the transition one experiences between major life changes, like rites of passage. This comes from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold, referring to the space between outside and inside: the door.

The ancients saw the powerful nature of this seemingly mundane idea; the Romans had many deities devoted to the doorway alone, including Forculus (the protector of the door), Cardea (who oversaw door hinges), and Limentinus (you can guess who he was the god of!)

The deities may have faded away, but the power of entryways is still discussed today in the interior design world. Olga Naiman, an interior designer whose work I am obsessed with, wrote a captivating Instagram post a while back that I think about every time I think about my home’s entryway. She highlights the potency of entryways (your home’s threshold) quite nicely:

“Your doorways are your power spots. They frame whatever you see through the and and make it more important … [P]ower is how the energy of that specific image affects your specific psyche… the act of your body crossing a threshold and entering a room activates your attention.”

Activates indeed!

As you pass through a door, something that, on the surface, seems so insignificant, what you see and feel as you pass through activates a transformation within you (even if it’s just as small as coming home from work). I’d argue that these transformations have the potential to prove that there is magic within us and in every seemingly minor detail in our world.

You just have to be willing to see the magic in the mundane.

Yours in the mundane and the magical,

Monica

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