Charm

[I wrote this a while ago, and there's something about it that doesn't yet sit right. It might be too abstract. Or it just might not be the entire truth. Throwing it away would be a shame, so I'm posting it with this disclaimer.]

charm
noun
1. the power or quality of giving delight or arousing admiration; an attractive or alluring characteristic
2. a small ornament worn on a necklace or a bracelet
3. an object, act, or saying believed to have magic power
4. an object kept to ward off evil or bring good luck
5. {physics} one of six flavors of quark

verb
1. delight greatly
2. gain or influence by charm
3. control or achieve as if by magic

Even at four and five years of age, I was interested in men. At that age, sidelong glances and batting eyelashes can have substantial impact. By age ten, I was a skilled conversationalist, “giving delight and arousing admiration” among my father’s business acquaintances at fancy restaurants. And by fifteen, my parents worried what I might be up to.

I am sociable and genuinely interested in others because I am myself so charmed by them. This warm thrill is the great reward for being human.

To charm and be charmed is to find the juice of life, to delight in another without knowing why. Our appreciation of one another is indeed a talisman, an exposed glimpse of the impulse to rise up shining in someone else’s heart. Doing this we become, as ourselves, a tiny object of power. This is magic, something ineffably delightful that sparkles between humans.

Thus, charm opens us deliciously, to something beyond the limited facts of life. It is an incantation that whispers, in the midst of an ordinary existence, “You are more than this.”

There are pitfalls, of course: you may forget the facts of who you are and behave inappropriately, giving the wrong impression, becoming addicted to the thrill, or forgetting when to stop. Nothing to do then but marvel ruefully from the wreckage of what we’ve done: at the life energy that flows through us; at our mysterious appreciation of the other; at how completely we can be snagged and made to feel alive by the promise of a lack fulfilled.

Whether as ornament, incantation, flirtation, all the faces of charm involve connection to something not actually separate from our self. The charms we utter and the charms we wear strike a chord within; they call out to something that resonates in return, as fundamental and invisible as the quarks that stir the nucleus of every atom. Momentarily connected to our own lost qualities, we are more than chance-bound beings, more than lumpen flesh. Opposites unite in us. Our nature is made whole, the garden regained; we are transfixed, transformed, and free.