Katherine May on Waking Up to the Wonder Already Around You =========================================================== Katherine May's Enchantment argues that wonder isn't a gift for the lucky few, it's a practice. We talk about why modern life goes gray, and the tiny sensory habits that bring the color back. ---------------------------------------- SAM: Hey, welcome back to 7 Minute Books. I'm Sam, and today we're talking about Enchantment by Katherine May. Sophie, I have to ask, because this one hit me harder than I expected. When did you last feel genuinely enchanted by something? SOPHIE: Hey there Sam. Honestly, that question is basically the whole book. Katherine May starts from this idea she calls disenchantment, which is that gray, numb, going through the motions feeling so many of us live inside. And her argument is that it's not a personal failing. It's something our culture actively produces. SAM: Right, and the way she describes it is so specific. It's like being stuck in the mud. You know the world is out there, you know there are beautiful things in it, but even noticing them feels like hauling yourself through wet cement. SOPHIE: Exactly. And she traces a lot of that back to the way we live now. Constant notifications, the pressure to always be productive, the sense that every hour needs to be optimized. We've traded a messy, sensory, physical world for a clean, efficient, disembodied one made of screens. SAM: Which is wild, because we did it on purpose. Nobody forced us. We just kept choosing the faster option until one day the sky was just background noise. SOPHIE: And that's where her central claim comes in, and it's the thing I keep coming back to. Enchantment isn't a passive gift that lands on a lucky few. It's a practice. It's a skill you can actually cultivate, the same way you'd build any other habit. SAM: That reframe is everything, honestly. Because my first instinct when I hear the word enchantment is fairy dust and spells, and I was ready to roll my eyes. But she's not talking about magic at all. She's talking about attention. SOPHIE: Yeah, and she's careful about it. She says this is not a naive return to some simpler time. It's a conscious, sometimes difficult reclamation of your own humanity. That phrase stuck with me. SAM: Okay so walk me through how she actually does it, because the book isn't a step-by-step program. It's more like a series of meditations, right? SOPHIE: Right, and the first piece is what she calls grounding. It's connecting to the physical world through your senses. The feel of soil in your hands. The sound of rain on the roof. The smell of bread baking. The warmth of the sun on your skin. SAM: See, and that sounds almost too simple. But I tried it last week. I just stood outside for five minutes and paid attention to what was actually hitting my senses, and it was strangely hard. My brain kept trying to drag me back to my phone. SOPHIE: That's the point though. She's not pretending it's easy. She says these small acts of attention slowly change your relationship with the world. It could be noticing the way light falls on a wall, or the texture of a leaf, or the taste of one really good strawberry. SAM: One strawberry. I love that she goes that small. It's not go climb a mountain and find yourself. It's eat a strawberry like you mean it. SOPHIE: And the second piece is the willingness to be surprised. She points out that disenchantment thrives on predictability. You know what your commute looks like, you know what your day holds, you've seen it all before. SAM: So enchantment requires letting the world be strange again. Which means letting go of your need to categorize everything. SOPHIE: Yes, and she borrows this idea of a beginner's mind. You approach familiar things as if you're seeing them for the first time. You stand under a starry sky and you're moved by it, not because you can name every constellation, but because it's incomprehensibly vast. SAM: That one got me, because I'm the guy who Googles the constellation. I want to file it away, and then it's done. She's basically saying the filing kills the wonder. SOPHIE: Right. And she says the same thing about music. Being moved by a piece without needing to analyze its structure. That kind of wonder is available to all of us, but we have to let our guard down first. SAM: Okay, then there's the ritual piece, which I did not expect to love as much as I did. She talks about how we've largely abandoned communal rituals, so we have to build our own. SOPHIE: And the key word there is intention. A ritual isn't a rote action. It's a moment of pause, a deliberate act of attention that transforms something ordinary into something that matters. She lights a candle to mark the end of her workday. She takes a weekly walk in a local park. SAM: You remember I tried that whole morning routine thing last month, and it fell apart in about four days. But this feels different, because it's not about being productive. It's about saying this moment counts. SOPHIE: Exactly, and that's why it sticks. It's not another task on the list. It's a way of marking time and connecting to something bigger than your to-do list. SAM: And then she gets into community, which surprised me in a book that's so much about individual attention. She calls it finding your tribe. SOPHIE: Yeah, and I think that's the piece people skip. She's clear that enchantment starts with an individual shift in attention, but it's sustained through shared experience. You need people who are looking for wonder too. SAM: Right, and it's not about finding people who agree with you on everything. It's a community of practice. A book club, a gardening group, a hiking club, or just friends who eat a meal together without their phones on the table. SOPHIE: That's the version of it I find most doable. A group of fellow travelers who remind each other that you're not alone in this. SAM: Okay, but here's where I actually pushed back when I first read it. I kept thinking, this is lovely, but the world is on fire. Is it a little indulgent to go smell the rain while everything's falling apart? SOPHIE: And she answers that directly, which I really respected. She says enchantment is not escapism and it's not forced happiness. It's a source of resilience. When you're connected to the world through your senses, you cope better with grief, loss, and uncertainty. SAM: So it's not a life free from pain. It's a life that stays rich with meaning even in the middle of pain. SOPHIE: Yes. She talks about finding beauty in a broken shell, comfort in a shared silence, and hope in the first green shoots after a long winter. That's the enchanted life. Not the easy life. SAM: And she's not naive about how hard it is either. She acknowledges the pull of our devices, the exhaustion, the pressure. She doesn't guilt you. She just invites you to start small. SOPHIE: Right, and the small stuff is genuinely small. Put your phone away for ten minutes a day. Take a different route to work. Cook a meal from scratch. Lie on the grass and watch the clouds. SAM: Those aren't radical acts. But she's saying they're foundational. They slowly rewire your attention, and the goal isn't to become a different person overnight. SOPHIE: It's just to gently, persistently turn your attention back to the world that's right in front of you. Which honestly is the whole book in one sentence. SAM: Yeah. And the thing I'm actually taking away is that the shimmer on a puddle, the smell of damp earth after rain, the feel of a warm hand in yours, those aren't consolation prizes. Those are the portals. They've been there the whole time. SOPHIE: They really have. And if you want to keep going after this, the whole library lives at 7minutebooks.com/app, with over 6,000 fiction and nonfiction titles you can read or listen to in any language, plus infographics on many of them. It's $2.99 a month, $9.99 a year, or $19.99 once for lifetime access. SOPHIE: The magic isn't in some far-off place. It's in the ordinary moments we've been trained to overlook. So go eat a strawberry like you mean it, and we'll see you in the next one.