Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

by Katherine May

Meanwhile, at the edge of consciousness, we sense a kind of absence. It is not so easy to articulate, but it carries its own dark middle-of-the-night fear, its own harrowing. It’s the sense that we have become disconnected from meaning in a way that we don’t even know how to perceive. We sense it when we worry that we cannot stem the flow of our materialism. We sense it when the pull of our smartphones feels a lot like an addiction. We sense it when we realise that our lives are lived in the controlled climate of air conditioning, but we still don’t want to feel the weather outside.

Constantly surrounded by conversation, we are nevertheless chronically lonely.

As I grow older, this begins to feel like a desperate lack. There has been a yearning in me that I’m only just beginning to understand, a craving for transcendent experience, for depth, for meaning-making. It’s not just that the world needs to change—I need to change, too.

I’m seeking what the poet John Keats called negative capability, that intuitive mode of thought that allows us to reside in “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” The subtle magic of the world offers comfort, but I don’t know how to receive it.

Enchantment is small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory. It relies on small doses of awe, almost homeopathic: those quiet traces of fascination that are found only when we look for them. It is the sense that we are joined together in one continuous thread of existence with the elements constituting this earth, and that there is a potency trapped in this interconnection, a tingle on the border of our perception.

the ability to sense magic in the everyday, to channel it through our minds and bodies, to be sustained by it.

Enchantment came so easily to me as a child, but I wrongly thought it was small, parochial, a shameful thing to be put away in the rush towards adulthood. Now I wonder how I can find it again. It turns out that it had nothing to do with beauty after all—not in any grand objective sense. I think instead that when I was young, it came from a deep engagement with the world around me, the particular quality of experience that accompanies close attention, the sense of contact that emerges from noticing.

“May I disappear,” wrote Simone Weil. “When I am in any place, I disturb the silence of heaven and earth by my breathing and the beating of my heart.”

Burnout comes when you spend too long ignoring your own needs. It is an incremental sickening that builds from exhaustion upon exhaustion, overwhelm upon overwhelm.

For me, the years trying to conceal my sensory distress and social dislocation in everyday life meant that I bounced in and out of burnout. It came in a different form every time. A sense of exhaustion so intense that I could barely stand; a collapse into muteness; a spiralling into all-consuming anxiety.

It occurs to me that I am resting. It is not the same as doing nothing. Resting like this is something active, chosen, alert, something rare and precious.

I am only just beginning to understand that my burnout was the result of multiple losses, each one of which seemed so small that I thought it didn’t matter. I willingly surrendered my meditation time because I thought it would be a vanity to demand it. I gave up reading and time alone and long, hot baths and walking. I gave up silence, and standing in the garden at sunrise. I let those moments become overrun by work and care, and I was surprised to find that, without them, there was nothing left of me.