When younger I often longed for the ability to use The Force (ala Star Wars). If only I could flick that light-switch from a distance! With time I realized I could, at a distance of ~2.5 feet (the length of my arm). All I had to do was think about it, and expend a tiny bit of energy. From what I saw of Star Wars, it took me far less energy to do it this way than it would have taken by concentrating and using The Force. It didn’t look as cool, since anyone could do it, but it kinda was a form of magic.
This led to my observation that Industry is much like powerful Ritual Magic.
Lately I’ve been renovating an old, trashed house. At times this can get very tedious. But thinking of myself as a wizard really helps the process along. And I don’t mean one of these new-fangled wizards, that just waves a wand around and says a few words and gets exactly what he wants. Kids these days are lazy and spoiled! Back in my day (of AD&D 2nd Ed) you had to do some work to get your magic! You had material components to carry around, which were consumed upon casting, and physical actions that had to be correctly performed, some of which got rather complex. Plus we walked to and from school, through six feet of snow, uphill both ways.
But doing anything that manipulates the physical world isn’t that different. To paint these kitchen cabinets I gathered my material components (gallons of paint of the desired color), my wand-substitutes (paintbrush and roller), and repeated the somatic components (hand moving back and forth inches from the surface to be altered, occasionally returning to the paint container) for a long period of time. This particular spell didn’t have any verbal components. Eventually the Change Color of Surface spell was completed, and now the kitchen looks quite a bit different. I have the power!
The downside of this particular spell is that it’s slow, and can take hours to cast on large areas. On the plus side – it works. It’s hard to overstate how useful that is.