Sometimes, particularly when things look hopeless, a little magic is all we need to remember that amazingly improbable things really do happen, and are often connected with our own thoughts and desires.

They almost never happen completely intentionally. I don’t mean we can just wish for something we want and get it. But sometimes the universe seems to offer a little “wink” that it is capable of responding playfully yet quite convincingly to our actions, as if to remind us that someone or something is listening.

I became convinced of this back in the late ’90s when I won a Fulbright to travel to New Zealand to work on the “changing shape of narrative.” I was invited to give a talk about digital technology and the future of storytelling, as part of the opening day ceremonies for the Te Papa Tongarewa museum. It was a great honor, and about half of the hundred or so people in attendance were Māori, the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand.

If you know anything about Māori culture, you would probably be as intimidated as I was at the prospect of trying to say anything of value to people who had preserved a civilization as rich as theirs through song, dance, poetry, storytelling, and chants (where the word tauparapara comes from). But they were extraordinarily welcoming (they even conducted a big welcoming ceremony called a pōwhiri, which actually put me at ease) so I went for it.

I was on stage, explaining how interactivity introduces a new dimension to storytelling and why, as a theater maker, I felt comfortable migrating to the digital realm. I wanted to show how breaking the “fourth wall” created a wonderful if uncomfortable tension between performer and audience. I remember saying, “Now I want you to feel in your bodies how the room changes when I move my body through the proscenium arch between the stage and the audience. It’s magical.”

I put my hands up in front of me, said “Watch this…,” and then just as my palms passed through the fourth wall, the lights went out, fire alarms in the building went off, and red emergency lights came on. The Māori started applauding, and then everyone got up and left the building as we were instructed by a voice over the public address system.

When we got outside, some of the Māori started hugging me. “Wonderful demonstration,” one said. “Brilliant how you did that,” another said. “You showed what you were saying.” I insisted I had not done anything. That it was pure coincidence. An old man put his forehead against my forehead, his nose against my nose, smiled, and said “Coincidence is the skill of a great storyteller.”

Half of me thought the Māori did it. That they had some indigenous magic they were employing on my behalf, as a way of supporting my journey, or making me take my own words more seriously.

But I never spoke about it until maybe 10 years later when I was teaching a class in “Interactive Media Theory” at The New School. I was again trying to explain the way that interactive technology offers an opening of possibility —that feedback loops can collapse cause and effect in interesting ways. So I told them my story of the museum, the Māori and fire alarms, but at least a few of them were unconvinced. They didn’t quite understand what I was getting at. “It was a coincidence. So?” one of them remarked.

There had been a fly buzzing around the room for the past hour, annoying the whole class, so I said, “It would be like me making my fingers into a gun,” (which I did) “then pointing it at the fly,” (which I did) “and then pretended to shoot it out of the air.” And at precisely the moment I pulled the trigger on my little pretend gun, the fly fell to the floor. Just like that.

“You killed it!” one student shouted. They gathered around the fallen bug. It was motionless. Then it wriggled a bit, recovered, and took off.

What happened there? Honestly, I can’t tell you. I’m sure there’s some students who still occasionally remind each other, “Remember the day Rushkoff shot the fly out of the air?” I know I do. And why did that magic moment only happen after I invoked the prior time something that magical had happened in my life? Moreover, why am I invoking both of those prior instances now? Am I trying to precipitate a third?

If I am, it’s in the hope of sharing the magic with you. We are all going through a rather dark moment, and sometimes it feels as if our future options are quite limited. I assure you they are not, at least if we don’t measure them by the metrics of the closed-minded utilitarian cynicism that got us in this mess.

No, our collective future may actually be depending on our willingness to play together, and to accept the possibility of the impossible.