Seeing the Wizard’s Feet

There’s a moment in The Wizard of Oz that has always stuck with me.
Not the colours. Not the songs. Not even the reveal itself.

It’s the feet.

The ordinary, very human feet of the wizard, sticking out behind the curtain.

Once you’ve seen them, you can’t un-see them.

And that’s strangely… comforting.

The comfort of seeing the mechanism 🧵🔧

Most people prefer the front of the tapestry. The picture. The story that makes sense when viewed from a distance.

I’ve always been more interested in the back.

The knots. The crossed threads. The places where the pattern breaks down or gets awkwardly tied off so the image can exist at all.

Seeing how something is held together matters more to me than being impressed by how it looks when finished.

It doesn’t ruin the magic.
It changes the kind of magic.

Nonsense as a coping strategy ♠️🌀

This is where Alice in Wonderland comes in.

Lewis Carroll didn’t write nonsense because he was unserious. He wrote it because ordinary logic wasn’t flexible enough to describe the world as it actually feels.

In Wonderland:

• rules exist because someone says they do
• authority is arbitrary
• logic loops back on itself
• contradictions are allowed to coexist

That kind of nonsense isn’t chaos. It’s a different geometry.

Non-Euclidean. Curved. Willing to admit that straight lines don’t always fit the terrain.

For me, nonsense is a gateway emotion. It’s the only shape some truths will pass through without breaking.

Comedic fairness and paradoxical logic 🤹‍♂️⚖️

Some situations don’t resolve cleanly. They’re not fair, but they’re not unjust either. They’re just strange.

Trying to force moral purity onto them only creates tension.

Paradox helps.

Comedy helps.

Not because the situation is funny, but because humour allows contradictory truths to exist without demanding a verdict.

I find paradoxical logic comforting for the same reason optical illusions are interesting. You can see the rules bending.

Nothing is hidden. Nothing is pretending to be more solid than it is.

Looking behind the curtain 🎭🧠

Seeing the wizard’s feet isn’t about cynicism.

It’s about refusing to be hypnotised by presentation.

Once you notice the strings, the levers, the seams, you stop asking the world to be perfect. You start asking it to be honest.

And honesty, even when it’s messy, is easier to live with than illusion held together by pressure.

Why this is comforting 🛠️😌

When you accept that:

• rules are often arbitrary
• fairness is sometimes theatrical
• meaning is assembled, not discovered

a lot of quiet anxiety disappears.

You stop waiting for the moment when everything finally makes sense.

You start enjoying the fact that it doesn’t.

The comfort isn’t in certainty.

It’s in seeing how the illusion works, and choosing to step back, smile at the feet beneath the curtain, and carry on anyway.

Final thought 🔚✨

Some people want the spell to hold.

I want to see the knots that make it possible.

Not to mock the magic,

but to understand why it was needed in the first place.