How to hold onto a sense of wonder

ADRIAN MA, HOST:

And for this week’s Enlighten Me segment, we’re revisiting a conversation Rachel Martin had with the author Katherine May. Her most recent book is about facing life’s uncertainties by tapping into a sense of enchantment.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

RACHEL MARTIN: Do you remember being enchanted as a child – like, a specific image, event, conversation that mesmerized you in that way?

KATHERINE MAY: Yes. And, in fact, the memories from childhood are actually very small things. But they felt so important to me. So I used to spend a lot of time sitting in my back garden, smashing rocks open with a hammer. We didn’t have iPads in those days. Like, life was hard.

(LAUGHTER)

MARTIN: Very enchanting activity.

MAY: Yeah. I mean, yeah, it probably says a lot about my childhood. But, you know, like, every – I don’t know – 10th or 20th stone would have, like, a little geode of crystals inside it.

MARTIN: Ah.

MAY: And that was absolutely magical to me.

MARTIN: Yeah.

MAY: I could uncover this little tiny cave that was millions of years old and which nobody had ever seen before. And there were loads of small things like that. And I guess there’s that time when everything feels heightened and everything feels very possible. And I think we almost deliberately shut that down as we get older.

MARTIN: You did not grow up in a religious household. Is that right?

MAY: No, not at all. And, in fact, probably the opposite of a religious household, if that’s possible – like, a household that felt very resistant to the idea of organized religion and which equally thought that people with more vague spiritual beliefs were a little bit cringeworthy. So I do worry what my family thinks of me these days. But I did go to church schools. Like, it’s really common in the U.K. to go to church schools. And I always actually loved the religious bits of my church schools without believing in it.

MARTIN: The notion of God is complicated, right? But for many of…