To-day for the first time in my life I baked bread.

How did I do this? I mixed Bisquick baking mix with slightly expired milk and stirred them into a pasty dough. Then I scooped out the dough onto nonstick cookie sheets and left them in the oven for twelve minutes at 425 degrees while I completed Wednesday’s New York Times crossword. Then I opened the door and voilà! Biscuits.

For the previous twenty-five years of my life I had no idea how bread formed. To me, the details of bread-making were completely shrouded in a thick paranatural fog of ignorance—if I came too close to the anomaly, peered too deeply, I would lose my head. Eventually I would come to acquire disconnected morsels of the Knowledge, as through a slow, fickle drip. Flour was involved. Maybe yeast too. Butter? The word leavening drifted often across this space of thought. The actual procedure by which this motley collection of non-bread things would transmute into Bread, though, remained just as maddeningly mystical a process as before. A trade secret known only to the guild of Bakers and their disciples.

And now?

I still haven’t the slightest clue how bread becomes bread. What alchemy operated upon my globules of sticky paste and left airy, flaky biscuits in its wake? At what point during my cruciverbal diversion did the inscrutable magic of the oven manifest itself? Had I kept watch through the glass window, would I have seen a moment where the doughy blobs shimmered in the high heat, glitched, and resolved themselves into specimens of Breadly splendour?

I still don’t understand the chemistry of it. Maybe I don’t need to. That’s just how it works.

This could be a metaphor for a lot of things. Code pipelines, sewing machines, human ensoulment, the healthcare system, language acquisition, building construction. Getting laws passed, becoming famous, falling in love. Everything about economics. All of these are like bread formation in the sense that (1) I don’t understand how they work, so they may as well be magic; and (2) I could try to seriously study them over an extended period of time and they would still seem like magic.