When I was eleven or twelve, someone from my old school got in touch with me out of the blue because they knew I liked horses and they were part-loaning a horse whose mother was also available for part-loan. It was an acquaintance rather than a friend, and not someone I would have chosen to hang out with necessarily. But the promise of a horse was all I needed to be sold on the idea.
After visiting and finding out more, I asked my mother if I could part-loan Mother Horse. She said she’d think about it. It was too much money, really. I was far from hopeful. Part-loaning a horse seemed impossible, primarily because I wanted it so much. At that time in my life, there was probably nothing I wanted more than a horse. If I want something that much, said my brain, logic dictates I mustn’t have it.
I stayed up all night praying at my window to whoever or whatever might hear me to please, please, somehow, someway, let me loan the horse. Sitting on the sill with my feet on the roof as I was wont to do, I bowed to the night and clenched my hands together in a sort of manic, energetic desperation. Please, please, please, please, please, please, please.
The next day, my mother said I could part-loan the horse. It was a miracle! My praying had worked!
Looking back objectively on the situation, it doesn’t look so much like a miracle as it looks like a woman with a tendency to overspend, who wanted to please her daughter and would soon go bankrupt. But at the time, it was a miracle.
And I think about that sometimes, when I’m wishing for miraculous things.
My whole life could change in an instant, and the change could be enacted through incredibly mundane, predictable to some, nigh-on inevitable avenues, and it would still be a miracle.
There are two things I want so much right now that my brain tells me they’re impossible. But if I consider them dispassionately, they’re entirely possible. They don’t even involve that many moving parts. There is not much that would need to align to have them manifest. They’re no big thing, despite how big they are to me. I could wake up tomorrow, and someone could have decided to grant me a miracle.