I spent my adult life pushing away my sense of enchantment. Illness taught me how much I needed it
or the first two months of this year, I was ill. I don’t mean the kind of ill that you can soldier on through, sniffing as you go. I mean properly, cancel-everything-and-take-to-your-bed ill. I was not sure when I would feel well again, and that was a problem because I had a book that was about to be published – a book about rekindling awe, wonder and fascination. I could barely stand up, let alone hold a thought in my head. Those soft emotions felt very far away.
Awe has always been available to us. It’s an artefact of our own attention, rather than a force that emanates from magnificent things. It is perpetually nearby, but we like to imagine that it’s far away, a place that we visit on once-in-a-lifetime holidays, rather than a practice that we can foster across a lifetime. I’ve tended to see it as a frippery, an unnecessary decoration on the edges of experience that I can safely afford to ignore most of the time. I no longer think that’s true.
But the difference, this time around, was that I had now been practising enchantment for long enough to know that I could find it close by, and all around me. At night, when I was feverish and wandering, the moon was still there. I could step outside to see her, and be soothed in her constant, silvery light. Sometimes, the most I could do was to squint at her through a crack in the window. But that was something. It was, in fact, a small taste of everything.
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