Learning from Calvin and Hobbes

You can learn a lot, maybe even build a simple life philosophy, from some of the titles of the collections of Bill Watterson's wonderful Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. (If you don't already own the immense complete edition, start saving now for it, put it on your Christmas list--just find a way to get it.)

Consider: It's a Magical World. The Days Are Just Packed. There's Treasure Everywhere.

We're talking serious California-style, watered-down Zen, but in a good way.

Okay, ignore the titles with words like "homicidal" and "deranged"--or build a different philosophy with them.

The others spring to my mind at times when life presents me magic in the midst of the mundane (or worse).

Today has been a reasonably hellish interval, with plane flights and crowds and work issues and non-stop work work work. I stopped for the first time at 9:00 p.m. to take a brief walk to a shop to buy some Diet Coke and bottled water. (Portland's water is fine; I bought bottled because drinking one reminds me to stay hydrated.) I emerged from my hotel into...

...magic. Almost the longest day of the year. Perfect blue sky. Perfect temperature. Light so bright that you could read comfortably. The air tinged with the energy of summer, of growth and play and green and young and immortal.

It's a magical world.