When the Magic Fades and What Comes After
At the end of a full, busy week, I found myself reflecting—not on the chaos, but on what stayed with me when I was still.
For me, it started in a meeting last week when my friend Jeff shared an essay by C. S. Lewis I’d never heard of before. It was simply called “Talking About Bicycles.”
I read it later that night. And it hasn’t left me since.
On the surface, Lewis is talking about riding a bike. But like most things he wrote, it’s really about how we move through life—how meaning forms, fades, and sometimes returns if we stay long enough.
He describes how we tend to pass through four stages with almost anything that matters.
First, there’s Unenchantment, the stage where the thing means nothing at all. It’s just background noise. A bicycle is a grown-up gadget. Love is someone else’s story. Purpose hasn’t arrived yet.
Then comes Enchantment.
The first ride. The first love. The first moment something opens up and the world feels electric. Possibility is everywhere. Energy comes easily. You think, This must be it. This must be what happiness feels like.
But if you stay long enough, enchantment gives way to something else.
Disenchantment.
The grind. The repetition. The uphill-both-ways season. What once felt magical now feels heavy. The bicycle becomes transportation. Love becomes work. Purpose starts to feel complicated.
This is where many of us stop.
We assume the magic lied. We decide the promise was false. We walk away, telling ourselves we’re just being realistic.
But Lewis says there’s a fourth stage—and it’s the one most people never reach.
He calls it Re-Enchantment.
Lewis makes a quiet but astonishing point: even if the early promise was a mirage, the longing it awakened was still telling the truth.
The desire wasn’t naïve. The hope wasn’t foolish. That glimpse of something more wasn’t a mistake, it was formative.
Lewis returns to this idea again and again in his writing. In Surprised by Joy, he describes those sudden flashes of longing, moments that feel like joy but never quite satisfy. He insists those moments were never meant to be possessed. They were meant to point. They awaken us to the reality that we were made for something deeper than the thing itself can deliver.
In other words, the enchantment wasn’t lying to us. It just wasn’t meant to finish the story.
What enchanted us in the beginning wasn’t meant to save us or make us whole. It was meant to shape us. To train our hearts. To stretch our capacity for meaning beyond what is immediate, efficient, or easy.
That’s why Lewis refuses to stop at disenchantment.
For him, disenchantment isn’t wisdom, it’s unfinished work. It’s the danger of mistaking disappointment for clarity and cynicism for maturity. Re-enchantment, the fourth stage, is where wisdom actually lives. It’s not the recovery of illusion—it’s the deepening of meaning.
Re-enchantment doesn’t deny reality. It includes it. It sees the cost clearly and chooses anyway. It lets the illusion die without killing the longing.
Here’s the detail Jeff shared that I never knew: C. S. Lewis never learned to drive.
Not as a protest. Not as a statement. By most accounts, it was a mix of practical reasons—poor eyesight, lingering injuries from World War I, and the simple fact that where he lived and worked, driving wasn’t necessary.
Still, the result matters. Lewis moved through the world at human speed. He walked. He rode buses. He rode a bicycle.
He stayed close to the ground.
In a world increasingly obsessed with speed, efficiency, and optimization, Lewis moved slowly enough to notice things most of us rush past. Maybe that’s why he could see what so many of us miss—that life isn’t meant to stay enchanted, but it can become deeply meaningful if we don’t leave too soon.
In The Weight of Glory, Lewis warns us not to confuse the desire for beauty, joy, or glory with the objects that first awaken it. The problem, he says, isn’t that we want too much—it’s that we settle for too little. We cling to the thing instead of following where it points.
Being HumanKind isn’t about chasing constant inspiration or trying to recreate the thrill of the beginning. It’s about choosing presence over escape. Staying long enough to hold both beauty and suffering in the same hands. Letting the hard parts refine us instead of harden us.
So maybe the question isn’t whether the magic was real. Maybe the question is whether we’re willing to stay long enough for meaning to replace illusion.
Sometimes the most human thing we can do isn’t start over.
It’s stay.
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P.S. This idea of staying, of choosing meaning over speed, presence over performance, is at the heart of Being HumanKind. The book is now available for preorder, and I’d be honored if it met you right where you are.
#BeingHumanKind #HumanFirst #StayLongEnough #ChoosePresence #LiveIntentionally ReEnchantment #InnerWork #MeaningOverMetrics #GrowthThroughGrace #FormedNotFinished
