When I was a child, I saw a magician perform a card trick.
He called a lady up to the stage and asked her “to pick a card, any card” from a deck.
The lady picked a card, showed it to the audience, then put it back into the middle of the deck.
The magician shuffled the deck.
Then he pulled a card from the deck, showed it to the audience—and all were amazed.
Except for me—I wasn’t amazed.
“What happened?” I asked my dad. “Why are people clapping?”
“He pulled the same card out of the deck that the lady picked!” said my dad.
This was puzzling. Why was this amazing?
You see, I was only seven years old—and I wasn’t familiar with a deck of cards.
It wasn’t amazing to me that the magician pulled the same card out of the deck that the lady picked because, having never played with a deck of cards, I assumed that all the cards in the deck were the same.
After that, I ignored the rest of the card tricks. I couldn’t see any amazement in them—until I grew older.
I needed to acquire assumptions about reality before the contravention of those assumptions could amaze me.
It’s what we think we know that limits what we think.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, usually available on Amazon for $4.91.