Extra Magic Time
We just got home from Disneyland Paris.
We've been talking about going for at least two years. Waiting until the kids were old enough to walk all day, not need a nap and be tall enough to enjoy most of the rides. Waiting for the new Frozen attraction to open. Finding the right weekend — not too hot, not too crowded, not a Swiss holiday or a French one, not too much time off school.
And then, finally, you go.
And because it's Disney, and because you've spent the money and taken the time and planned the trip and you're probably not coming back for another thirty years, you want to do it right.
So you study the map. You reserve the princess lunch. You stay up for the fireworks. You book the hotel that gives you Extra Magic Time.
And at 8:32 in the morning, instead of enjoying the fact that I was walking into Disneyland with three ridiculously excited children, I was staring at a little blue dot on my phone wondering why it wasn't moving.
I trusted that blue dot instead of my instincts — and I'm good at reading a map. I knew something was off. But I wanted to do it right, and the Disneyland app told me that I just needed to keep walking straight (into the castle, mind you) and I would get there!
So, we lost 15 minutes and ended up queuing for 45 minutes for the ride we'd planned to beat the crowds to.
We'd wasted our Extra Magic Time.
Which, when you write it down, is an absolutely ridiculous sentence.
But I think there's something very human about it.
The more special an experience is supposed to be, the more pressure we put on ourselves to extract everything possible from it.
I do this in summer too.
Wake the kids early because they have to see the sunrise over the mountains. Keep them up special because the sunset over the Atlantic is just breathtaking. Swim in the pool after dark because it's so much more fun with the underwater lights on.
It is magical. It is time together. And it is Extra. Extra special, extra money, extra energy.
And somewhere in all of this is the question I keep coming back to:
When does trying to squeeze the most out of an experience get in the way of experiencing it?
Or maybe the better question is: what was I trying to get out of it in the first place?
A long time ago, I listened to a podcast where Tracee Ellis Ross talked about something she does before parties. She thinks about how she wants to feel after the party.
At Christmas, I can care about the tablecloth, the name-card holders and the pomegranate seeds floating in the champagne. And believe me, I do.
But if I ask myself what I want to feel when I go to bed that night, the answer is never, God, I'm glad the table looked so good.
It's almost always that I was fully there, in a moment with someone I love.
And once I know that, the details don't stop mattering. They just stop being the point.
Disney was the same.
I could have made a list of the rides I wanted us to do. And actually, I basically did.
But what did I want to feel driving home?
That we'd had an adventure together.
And we did.
My daughter, sitting beside me at a picnic table, telling me, "I want to marry myself with you."
My four-year-old telling me his legs were really tired, but if I carried him just a little bit longer, he'd have enough strength to carry me afterwards.
My eight-year-old grabbing my hand on a roller-coaster to reassure me that it was okay if I was scared.
Those weren't the things I optimized for. But they're the things I’ll remember.
They're the magic.
On the drive home, we listened to something about the Buddhist idea that craving is the origin of suffering.
And I thought: yes. That makes complete sense.
I craved riding all the rides. I craved not standing in a queue for 90 minutes when, if I'd played it right, I could have waited 10. I craved getting every last bit of magic out of the time we'd spent two years waiting for.
And with that craving came suffering.
The unmoving blue dot. The 45-minute queue we were supposed to beat. The last available princess lunch reservation — at 3:15 — that I'd triumphantly managed to secure, only to sit there wondering why I'd paid quite so much money as we waited 50 minutes for a glass of tap water and a menu.
And then my daughter got Cinderella's autograph and hugged Aurora while wearing a matching dress.
And it was completely worth it.
It reminded me of something I wrote here before: maybe that's what parenting asks of us — to hold the hard, the holy and the hilarious, all at once.
Maybe the magic isn't what happens when everything goes right. Maybe it's all of it.
I could have wanted less. Expected less. Accepted whatever happened as it happened.
But I'm not sure I want to.
I want to want things. I want to anticipate them. Plan them. Get excited about them. Occasionally go completely overboard for them.
And I know I have to accept that some disappointment comes with that.
But I try to remember over a decade ago, when my husband and I we were stuck in an enormous American traffic jam on the way to the airport, increasingly certain we were going to miss our flight back to London.
I was, naturally, stressing.
He looked at me and said: "We're not going anywhere. Let's just get out of the car and dance."
Maybe that's the balance I'm looking for.
Not to stop craving. But to know when there's nothing left to do but dance.
Because on day two, we absolutely learned from our mistakes, got our act together and managed three rides during Extra Magic Time.
I'm still me.
But somewhere between sprinting across Disneyland with kids on our backs to make the last Elsa timeslot and the fireworks, and adding a stack of tissues under my son's heel so his skull touched the height marker instead of just his hair, I hope I keep remembering:
The magic is already happening.
Stay Curious,
Erica
