Last week, I went to see a friend’s band play at a club in Hollywood, and got there to discover that they were third on the bill.  I had some time, so went across the street to Starbucks, where I read the paper and drank a cafe mocha.  The colorful characters are always present along Hollywood Boulevard, and a number of them were streaming in and out of the Starbucks, so I amused myself by tweeting about them.

One of them was a teenaged girl lugging a big suitcase. Her cheeks were painted in glitter. She looked tired. She ordered a water, then got a book out of a suitcase that looked to be crammed with rave clothing, smelled the book, and began reading.  On occasion, as she was reading, she would laugh out loud.

I figured I had the story.  Practically a cliche.  Underage girl, probably a runaway, goes to Hollywood rave, crashes with people she meets there, and when everyone is no longer amused, they kick her onto the street.  Now she was headed back to San Bernardino or Topeka, or wherever.

To confirm all this, I initiated a conversation with her.  It turned out that her name is Amber.  She works with a group in the Bay Area called Magic Princess that does party performances.  A couple of days earlier, they had gotten a phone call from the Make-a-Wish Foundation in L.A., and Amber happened to be in the office when the call came.  An eight year old girl from Los Angeles with a terminal illness had made a wish to see a fairy.  Amber volunteered to play the fairy.  She rode a bus for 12 hours from Oakland to L.A., spent the afternoon being the little girl’s fairy and was waiting for the bus, to ride 12 hours back home.

The light of Amber’s beautiful story exposed the wrongness of my pathetic preconception. How often do we do this? We perceive things to be a certain way because we see them from the perspective of our own experiences, when in reality, our own experiences are a very narrow lens, like trying to see the world through a pinhole camera. When we manage to put down that lens and really look around, we discover that every interaction holds the potential for something new and wonderful.

It is only when we let go of our own narratives, our scripts for what we think we want our lives to be, our prejudices preconceptions and fears, that we can truly experience the beauty of what life actually is. We don’t have to make the magic. It’s all around us. And if we’re open to it, it will happen.