Enchantment: An Antidote to Pessimistic Laziness and Boredom
(A meditation for myself, at a moment when I feel the heaviness and compression of human so-called civilization. I’m posting it here in case someone like you might be feeling something similar. Perhaps we can take heart in enchantment, together.)
Note to self: the modern habit of doom-and-glooming the world (and blaming my neighbours for the crisis of the day because they don’t see it the same way I do) is not just the fast track to depression. It’s lazy, and boring.
This quote from René Magritte has been haunting me for days, in the most disturbingly delightful way:
“Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so. It is an easy task, because people who are intellectually lazy are convinced that this miserable terror is “the truth”, that this terror is knowledge of the “extra-mental” world. This is an easy way out, resulting in a banal explanation of the world as terrifying.
Creating enchantment is an effective means of counteracting this depressing, banal habit.”*
It should go without saying, but just as a reminder: the algorithms of social media platforms elevate and escalate the most extreme edges of the social curve, even prioritizing the voices of those who have become actually unhinged, at one end of the political spectrum, or the other.
Whatever other benefits they offer us, our modern channels of communication are also contributor and amplifier of the darkest of mental states. We are supposed to feel rage or despair or impossible envy, when we get off a scrolling session on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tik-Tok, YouTube. And the cable tv or newspapers of legacy media are, of course, equally unwholesome.
Bad news, polarization, outrage, multiple crises that we are apparently powerless to do anything about: the collective addiction to such is so banal as to become ironically, tragically un-newsworthy
Disgust with my neighbour is . . . pretty ho-hum.
There are fascinating people to discover.
Assuming that politics, human beings, and the earth’s ecology are going to hell in a hand basket unless I sit here, typing retorts at my neighbour, or self-flagellating over my mutable and immutable characteristics. . . is lacking in both imagination and magic.
I am so much more than that. You are so much more than that. The world is wild, and full of wonder.
Choosing dull narrow-mindedness and pessimism because it is spoon-fed to me is lazy, when there is a whole cornucopia of thought forms, natural environment, art, skills to learn, groups to participate with, people to help, ways to explore, contributions that are worthy of my very best self. In other words: presence, pleasure and purpose.
There are endless things to be curious about, and create.
This wild world, hung in the vastness of universe, is so much more miraculous than what my species of ‘human beings’ describes as challenge, or crisis.
Even when I’m exhausted, and all is heaviness. An infinitesimal slice of enchantment—of falling under the song-spell of Life— can alter the physics of the moment.
This is not to pollyanna it, or spiritually bypass the work of the individual, or of the collective. This is not to deny the horror of millennia of suffering, or our capacity to create our own extinction.
It is only to remind myself that when I limit my perspective to what I have decided is ‘the truth’ based on our disturbing and predictable human behaviour, I lose access to enthusiasm, purpose, and whatever agency I may yet have.
And these, too, are truths in the world.
They might even offer some solutions, to our collective troubles.
My invitation today, to me and to you: go find some enchantment.
Choose something, ponder something, remember something, make something, grow something, go somewhere, be with another creature. . . practice whatever it is I have, that holds me in wholeness, and unlocks my remembrance of enchantment in the world.
*quoted from the piece “Surrealism in the Sunshine” cited in June 4 edition of The Marginalian newsletter published by Maria Popova