I participate in a local pagan book club, and at our last meeting a couple of us got into a side discussion about expectations for success with spellwork. I’d mentioned that my wife and I had gone through a spate of unexpected appliance replacements which needed to be taken care of recently: a new water heater, new microwave, and last week a new refrigerator. My wife had been lamenting the expenses and wondering if something was in retrograde to cause all this, and I had to admit that, you see, I’d done this spell….

For the tarot spell project I’ve been doing, I did a sort of wide-ranging prosperity spell a while back — not the normal sort of money-bowl, cinnamon-through-the-front-door type thing, but more along the lines of building an overall comfortable existence. Twelve different specific intentions went into the spell, many of which I’ve forgotten the specifics of at this point.

(Which I believe to be a good thing. Letting a spell live in the subconscious is an effective strategy, and one that isn’t always easy to achieve, so the forgetting is an accomplishment!)

However, one that I do remember putting in had to do with the many, many unfinished (and sometimes only conceptualized and not started) projects in our house being completed. Having so much stuff in the house that needs to be fixed or finished or changed has an impact on my stress level, for sure. So part of a comfortable life would definitely involve not having these pending issues lurking around me all the time.

Now, when I did the spell I had a couple of specific projects in mind that I wanted to see done sooner rather than later, but I definitely wouldn’t argue that they are more important than the very old appliances we’ve had to replace. Especially since things like water heaters and refrigerators can fail in catastropic fashion and become even more costly problems. What’s happened instead is that we’ve found ourselves able to afford replacements of these things just when they start showing signs of being at the end of their lifespan. If you’d have asked me at the time of the spell if we would be able to afford the replacement costs for these things, I’d have laughed at the absurdidty. But somehow the stars have aligned to make the funds available at the right times.

When this came up in the discussion, though, it became clear that for some people this sounded like a backfiring spell. For some in the room, this would be a situation where they would do further workings to redirect the spell or create a servitor to make it work exactly as envisioned. Or maybe just start over. Whatever it took to avoid having any more unexpected appliance replacements or repairs come up. And I’m not sure why that reaction surprised me, but it did.

Now, I’m not saying either position is entirely right or entirely wrong – it’s two different perspectives that are equally valid. But it’s become part of not just my philosophy on magic but on life itself that it’s important not to be too rigid in our intentions and expectations. Doing magic over the years and watching other people’s magical practices develop has shown me how bad we all tend to be at setting intentions. When we have problems we want to solve — magical or mundane — we often have very specific visions for what the right solution is, and most of us aren’t very flexible or open to alternative solutions. We want what we want exactly how we want it, regardless of other potentially better options that exist. When we ask for things we expect that thing to come as envisioned.

But in my experience, some of the best results I’ve gotten from my magic have been when the thing I asked for showed up in an unexpected form or from an unexpected direction. Beyond that, some of the biggest blessings in my life have been from things that didn’t go the way I wanted them to, but actually turned out to be better than if they’d gone to my plan. Magically speaking, maybe it’s that the forces of the universe know better how to get me where I actually want to go. Or maybe it’s just a mindset thing and I’ve just learned to be happy with what I have rather than hanging onto disappointment about what might have been. It could be a matter of faith, or it could just be a matter of optimistic thinking.

And maybe it’s actually even deeper than that.

In the conversation at book club, someone asserted that if a practitioner got positive, tangible results from their spells 30% of the time, they were an exceptionally good practitioner. And I didn’t argue with them — I don’t think they’re necessarily wrong. But it made me realize that we have very, very different standards of what counts as success. The more open you are to spells bringing you variations on what you’ve asked for or what you think you want, the more likely you are to feel successful at spellwork. If you only count it as a success if you get exactly what you asked for in the way you envisioned it, you’re not going to see success as often. Nobody has a 100% success rate at magic, but what success rate you do have varies drastically depending on the parameters of success.

I feel like a lot of practitioners struggle with the mindset shift necessary to be open to their magic playing out in its own way. Life had to teach me the hard way that my plan isn’t always the best one. But I also think a lot of practitioners who prefer to be very specific in their expectations struggle with feeling like their magic doesn’t work. It becomes something of a defining aspect of a person’s approach to magic: do we trust the forces at work in our magic to bring us the best of what is possible regardless of our expectations, or do we seek to master the skills to command those forces and bend them entirely to our will? Maybe in the end it all comes down to how much we trust ourselves to be in control, or conversely how much we are willing to give up some of that control to whatever forces are out there working our magic.