A lot of us save the word magic for the big stuff, the once-in-a-lifetime moments and the things that seem to happen mostly to other people. Meanwhile the genuinely remarkable things go by unremarked, because they happen on a Tuesday and nobody claps.

Everyday Magic is a witch mid-flight against a sky that cannot quite decide whether to storm, which is a fair picture of most ordinary days. She is not doing anything showy up there. She is going where she needs to go, in the weather she was given, and that turns out to be the impressive part.

You do the same thing constantly without calling it anything. You remember which friend hates being phoned without warning. You notice the one person at the table who has gone quiet. You make a room easier to be in simply by walking into it, and it has probably never occurred to you to count that as a skill.

It is not a small thing. It is just a quiet one.

The people who actually change your week rarely announce themselves, and they are almost never the ones performing. They are the ones paying attention. If you have spent years waiting to finally become someone impressive, this is a reminder that you have been doing the work the whole time, in the weather you were given, on the ordinary days nobody thought to photograph.