How to rest when life is overwhelming (w/ Katherine May)

When someone you love is going through a difficult time, what do you say? Despite your best intentions, author Katherine May argues offering help or shying away from tough conversations isn’t as effective as you think. Katherine is the author of the memoir, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, and its latest companion piece, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age. Chris and Katherine share how humor may sometimes be a good medicine and how to live alongside life’s difficulties. Follow Host: Chris Duffy (Instagram: @chrisiduffy https://www.instagram.com/chrisiduffy/?hl=en | chrisduffycomedy.com https://chrisduffycomedy.com/) Guest: Katherine May (Instagram: @katherinemay_ https://www.instagram.com/katherinemay_/ | Website: katherine-may.co.uk/ https://katherine-may.co.uk/) Links Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times (UK Bookshop https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/wintering-the-power-of-rest-and-retreat-in-difficult-times-katherine-may/3408348 / US & CAN Bookshop https://bookshop.org/p/books/wintering-the-power-of-rest-and-retreat-in-difficult-times-katherine-may/16519711) Enchantment: Reawakening Wonder in an Exhausted Age (UK Bookshop https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/enchantment-reawakening-wonder-in-an-exhausted-age-katherine-may/7350453?ean=9780571378357 / US & CAN Bookshop https://bookshop.org/p/books/enchantment-awakening-wonder-in-an-anxious-age-katherine-may/18582677) Subscribe to TED Instagram:@ted https://www.instagram.com/ted/?hl=en YouTube:@TED https://www.youtube.com/@TED TikTok:@tedtoks https://www.tiktok.com/@tedtoks?lang=en LinkedIn:@ted-conferences https://www.linkedin.com/company/ted-conferences Website:ted.com https://ted.com Podcasts:https://www.ted.com/podcaststed.com/podcasts http://ted.com/podcasts For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts https://go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Chris Duffy?

  You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy. All of us experience winter. Now, you might be saying, Chris, don't you live in Los Angeles, a part of Southern California that famously does not really experience winter? And to that, I would say you are technically correct if we're talking about purely a meteorological winter. I haven't pulled out a winter coat or seen snow falling on my house since I moved here. That's true. Often, in January in LA, I see someone wearing a heavy sweater on the street and then right next to them, someone wearing just shorts and a tank top. So, you know, winter is not always just a temperature. Sometimes, winter can be a state of mind. And I'm joking about that, but I'm also not joking, because winter

• 0:43Chris Duffy?

  really is an emotional season. It can be a state of experience. And what we're going to talk about on the show today is that metaphorical winter, because our guest is the brilliant writer Katherine May, author of Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. To frame our conversation, to talk about these metaphorical winters, the dark periods in our life that all of us will go through, here is Catherine reading a passage from her book.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Everybody winters at one time or another. Some winter over and over again. Wintering is a season in the cold. It's a fallow period in life when you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness or a life event, such as a bereavement or the birth of a child. Perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you're in a period of transition and have temporarily fallen between two worlds. Some winterings creep upon us more slowly, accompanying the protracted death of a relationship, the

• 1:52Speaker 01

  gradual ratcheting up of caring responsibilities as our parents age, the drip, drip, drip of lost confidence. Some are appallingly sudden, like discovering one day that your skills are considered obsolete, the company you worked for has gone bankrupt, or your partner is in love with somebody new. However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful.

• 2:24Chris Duffy?

  Catherine's book is one of the most moving and profound pieces of literature that I have read. And I found this interview genuinely to be one of the conversations that I am most grateful to be able to have had on this show. Catherine is so special. Please stick around to hear more after this quick break.

• 2:48Speaker 02

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• 3:17Chris Duffy?

  This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them, in and out of court. And that fight needs your support today. Donate at N R D C dot org slash human, and your gift will be matched five times.

• 4:06Chris Duffy?

  We're talking with Katherine May about the inevitability of difficult seasons in your life, and how to survive those seasons when they come.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Hi, I'm Katherine May, author of Wintering and Enchantment.

• 4:17Chris Duffy?

  So Catherine, your work, your books, Wintering and Enchantment, they have really focused on what to do when it feels like our lives are falling apart, when everything is going wrong and we're overwhelmed. And in your book, Wintering is in part about how tough times are inevitable and how we should view them as seasons, kind of as natural as winter. That's how I've described your book when I am recommending it to friends and I've recommended it to so many people. But how do you describe your books to someone who's not already familiar with them?

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Sure. So Wintering is a book about the dark seasons in life. So it thinks about our metaphorical winters when we feel frozen out of life, out in the cold, all those words that we commonly use to describe periods of illness or disaster or just general trouble. And it's also like a song to winter, which is my favorite season. And then Enchantment kind of follows it up in lots of ways and thinks about how we emerge from those winters and how we can reestablish contact with the world and just begin to feel that sense of exchange between us and everything around us again, when we've felt very numb and very dislocated.

• 5:28Chris Duffy?

  These books resonated so deeply with me. And one of the big reasons, I think, is you are directly addressing a really big problem in our society, I think, which is that we believe that we can avoid dark and painful and difficult times. And that when they happen, since we think they can be avoided, we think that it's somehow our fault that we've brought them on and that they shouldn't be there and that we should keep them hidden away rather than sharing them with others.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a really profound belief that we fail if we winter. Whereas actually, if you think about it for just a few moments, it's entirely obvious that it's normal. You know, we can't live a whole life without having someone dear to us die. We can't live a whole life without getting sick. We rarely get to live a whole life without losing a job, for example. I mean, there are there are so many different things that can happen. And yet, quite often, when we see them happen to other people, we do this little trick of the mind that that says, okay, so why is that their fault? Like, what would I have done differently?

• 6:45Speaker 01

  And I still catch myself doing it. And that, you know, it's protective, isn't it? Like, we just don't want to think that that kind of horror is possible. But then, of course, when it visits us, we are left with no toolkit to process what's happening. And of course, guilt is inevitably the thing that comes up first of all, because we we do seem to be like a very guilt laden species in the first place. And we we don't allow ourselves any other exit route, really.

• 7:14Chris Duffy?

  I want to read a few quotes from from Wintering here. Towards the beginning, you write, however it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful. Yet it's also inevitable. We like to imagine that it's possible for life to be one eternal summer and that we have uniquely failed to achieve that for ourselves. And then later on, a few pages later, you write, in our relentlessly busy contemporary world, we are forever trying to defer the onset of winter. We don't ever dare to feel its full bite, and we don't dare to show the way it ravages us. An occasional sharp wintering would do us good. We must stop believing that these times in our lives are somehow silly, a failure of nerve, a lack of willpower. We must stop trying to ignore them or dispose of them. They are real, and they're asking something of us. We must learn to invite the winter in.

• 7:59Chris Duffy?

  We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how. I was so struck especially by this last line there. We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how. I wonder if I can just get you to talk a little bit more about that.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we can't push that phrase too far, because obviously, like, if we got to choose how, we would tend to rush it through, actually, like, you know, this this time in life is vile and I want it over with. But what we can do is enter this path of radical acceptance. And know that actually, winter is like necessary change arriving. Not welcome change, but necessary change. And what that means is that we can allow ourselves to be mindful through that process, to notice everything that's happening, to ask what's going on, to try and find a way to stop resisting it.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Because as Alan Watts says, like, a lot of the the pain that we experience is the running from the pain. That that is the kind of very definition definition of pain. And instead, we can begin to think, okay, I'm going through a fundamentally human process here. And when I come out the other side of it, which I will on some level, I will have gained in like wisdom and the rich experience of the world.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  And we need to learn to do that without saying, and I can avoid suffering in the process, because that just isn't part of the deal.

• 9:35Chris Duffy?

  I think this is the kind of conversation where it actually really helps sometimes to be specific and personal. So I I try sometimes to not make it all about me. But I think just to share a a particularly dark winter for me was my wife had gotten very ill mysteriously with injuries and chronic pain. And it had led to her essentially not being able to take care of herself or or or do anything, you know, just barely able to hang on. And that plunged her into an extremely dark depression. And it felt to me, as a person who loved her,

• 10:18Chris Duffy?

  like, things were getting so bad so fast and past a point that I knew that things could ever get bad. And I felt for me, this sense that I was working as hard as I possibly could, trying so hard and it was essentially doing nothing. Like I was barely keeping the wheels on, but the things were just getting worse and worse.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  That kind of treading water thing and you're getting more and more exhausted and you're just actually losing ground. Yeah.

• 10:51Chris Duffy?

  The metaphor I used quite frequently was that I am using a hundred percent of my effort to just keep us both from drowning, but we are not making any progress. You know, fortunately, that is not where we're at anymore. And so one of the things that really resonates with me about the metaphor you choose of winter is that it's a season. It doesn't mean that it's a short season and it also is inevitable, but, but it is a season. But the thing, the other thing that I want to talk about, because I know that you believe this too, based on reading the book, is when I was in that time, the thing that could bring like white hot fury to me was the idea that there is like, every cloud has a silver lining.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's a trigger point for me.

• 11:38Chris Duffy?

  You know, like I would try and tell someone how absolutely horrific things were and they'd be like, you're gonna get through this and be stronger on the other side. And I was like, I could rip your jugular vein out right now.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Oh, Chris, I have to tell you, having, you know, having spent the last five years talking about wintering, we are in my family currently dealing with a very new winter. My husband got a cancer diagnosis two weeks ago and that is a very live issue for us right now. The number of people who, who just can't go there and like, all I need right now is for people to say, God, that's awful. I'm so sorry. Like I don't, I need no more than that. Like if they want to make me a cup of coffee alongside that, I'm delighted with, with any help I can get. Cause as you say, like the illness is exhausting for everybody in the household, you know, least of all the person who's actually sick.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  But I'm hearing everybody's kind of cancer fears coming up at me at the moment and they're not relating to what we're going through. And instead, actually, what people would say is, oh, it's fine. He'll get better. Loads of people get better. And yes, that's really true. And you know, prognosis is so much better than it used to be. And Medical technology is extraordinary and you know, we're doing everything we can. But actually, we need to develop safe spaces in this world to say, oh, that's scary, isn't it? You know, or wow, that that uncertainty must be hard to deal with,

• 13:15Speaker 01

  rather than kind of jumping to hang on in there, you'll you'll be able to tough it out, you know, this is gonna be fine. Like it, it's just not true. You know, it's not true and we are intelligent people and we need to have better conversations with each other than this. We deserve it.

• 13:35Chris Duffy?

  Yeah, it it. I think it really does reveal the lie in some of the cliches that we want to believe, right? Like what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And I'm like, many things that don't kill you actually leave you much weaker.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And also, I mean, having again, like having had these conversations for many years, people say, and of course, you'll come out better. And and actually, the truth is, no, no, no, no, no, you won't necessarily like sometimes. When we're wintering, we're processing a decline or a loss. And life won't be better afterwards necessarily. And the and the horrible truth behind all of that is that we will all at some point in our lives face a decline. However, that doesn't make our lives worthless and it doesn't mean we can't come to terms with it. And it doesn't mean that we can't live a beautiful and full and rich human existence within that difficulty.

• 14:29Chris Duffy?

  But the thing that I think is so important about the message that you're delivering is that the message that at least I needed to hear and that I think a lot of people need to hear when they're in these dark, dark times is not you're going to be better or it's all going to be okay. It is you are not alone. You're not the only person who's ever experienced this. I understand. That is actually the important message and that is the message that you're delivering.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it is possible to experience your pain and come out the other side of it. That is, that's not an impossible feat. And I, you know, I just, I mean, at the moment, the world seems so dark, so much is happening that is so utterly terrifying. And I just think we need this ability right now to say. Oh God, that is hitting me right in the chest. This is agony, this is awful, I am in pain.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, that's how we look each other in the eye then, isn't it? That is the stuff that we've got in common.

• 15:34Chris Duffy?

  You have this beautiful quote towards the end of Wintering where you're talking about Alan Watts saying in The Wisdom of Insecurity. He says, "To hold your breath is to lose your breath." And then you explain that the case that he's making is that life is by its very nature uncontrollable. That we should stop trying to finalize our comfort and security and instead find a radical acceptance of the endless unpredictable change that is the very essence of this life. "Our suffering," he says, "comes from the fight we put up against this fundamental truth."

• 16:05Speaker 01

  We create the suffering, or maybe not entirely, but we certainly make it way, way worse. Because we do everything we can to get around the suffering. It's almost like you get a thorn in your hand and your body swells around it. That's what we do around our pain. Instead of actually allowing ourselves to perceive the thorn, we will do anything to avoid feeling it. We will, in some cases, turn to drugs or alcohol. We will keep so busy we can't think straight. We will seek out solutions that we know won't work. Like, we will just run and run and run and run and run.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  And the problem is, at some point, we are stopped. We run out of energy, we run out of options. The world just says enough, come on, that's it now. And it's like taking a drunk person home.

• 17:06Chris Duffy?

  We have got a lot more conversation coming up in just a moment. But first, we're going to take another quick break.

• 17:22Speaker 03

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• 18:20Chris Duffy?

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• 19:03Chris Duffy?

  In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 19:13Chris Duffy?

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• 19:55Chris Duffy?

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• 20:13Chris Duffy?

  We're talking with Katherine May, author of the books Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, and the book Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age. And here is Catherine reading another passage for us from Wintering.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  I'm beginning to think that unhappiness is one of the simple things in life, a pure, basic emotion to be respected, if not savored. I'd never dream of suggesting that we should wallow in misery or shrink from doing everything we can to alleviate it, but I do think it's instructive. After all, unhappiness has a function. It tells us that something is going wrong. If we don't allow ourselves the fundamental honesty of our own sadness, then we miss an important cue to adapt. We seem to be living in an age when we're bombarded with entreaties to be happy, but we're suffering from an avalanche of depression.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  We're urged to stop sweating the small stuff, yet we're chronically anxious. I often wonder if these are just normal feelings that become monstrous when they're denied. A great deal of life will always suck. There will be moments when we're riding high and moments when we can't bear to get out of bed. Both are normal. Both, in fact, require a little perspective.

• 21:39Chris Duffy?

  There's this interesting phenomenon that I think pretty much everyone, everyone has experienced this phenomenon when they're in a really emotionally painful time, which is that some form of art can sometimes really speak to you in a way that other things can't. I mean, the classic is to listen to a breakup song, but for some people, it's going to the movies or watching a comedy special or looking at art or making art. And one of the really interesting sensations of being in these moments of intense emotion is I have felt like my outer layer of skin is completely removed and I just feel everything and it's overwhelming and impossible to live like that forever.

• 22:24Chris Duffy?

  But there's this moment where just everything is so intense. And again, without saying like, there's a gift or this is a good thing. But that is quite an interesting and different way of experiencing the world. And I think it's very tied towards art and the experiencing and the making of art is to feel every emotion, to be able to cry so easily, to be able to laugh with wild abandon, to have these feelings run through you at a 10 immediately, rather than the three or four that they might be at in a different moment in your life.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's a complicated gift, but it is actually a strange gift that we're given at these points because as well as being alive to pain, we are so alive to beauty in these moments and just the tiniest, tiniest thing can just feel transcendent for a few moments. And I, I do think that one of the, one of the factors of a wintering that we ignore is how emotionally varied they are, you know, like we, we come away remembering the sadness and the misery and the struggle. But when you look at it moment by moment, what we're actually experiencing is like super intense emotions all the way through.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  And you know, people's kindness to us right now is so moving. I cannot, when someone's sick, you often end up like remodeling the bathroom so they can get in and out of the shower and things like that, like as if everything else isn't on your plate. That's, that's where we are right now. And I had a pallet of tiles delivered yesterday and I was already like dreading it, you know, I was just thinking, I've got to carry all these damn tiles in on my own, you know? Like it's all I could think about all day. And the pallet arrived, I picked up the first box, carried it into my house. And as I was coming out of my front door to get the next box, my neighbour was already carrying a box in. Like he'd seen it out the window and he just came out to help. He didn't ask, he didn't need me to ask.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  And I was so moved by that, you know, like the, that's the beauty that you begin to see is that people are looking for a way to help. And it was, it was a little bit of magic, honestly, like I really, I really kind of thought, I never want to forget how beautiful it was just for someone to, to just know that you'd be struggling with that and to just pop out of their house and carry stuff in for you.

• 24:47Chris Duffy?

  It's so much better when you experience that kindness from others, the companionship of others. And yet, I think most commonly people say, Catherine, I'm so sorry to hear this is going on. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help. And that's very, very well intentioned and yet almost impossible to take, to take them up on that. So how do you, how, how does one and how are you leaving yourself open to those moments of absolutely necessary vital kindness without having to text all the people who have texted you back and say, could you come and help me move these pallets, which just feels impossible to do?

• 25:28Speaker 01

  I've reflected on this a lot because I think that we're all happier giving care than receiving it, essentially. You know, we see the state of needing care as a kind of humiliation or a weakness. And, and yet, like, we are in need of care right now. And so I've been disciplining myself when people say, how are things? Into kind of, if it's the right person, like not, not just any, any person, but the people that I'm actually close to, who do, who I know really care, saying, learning to say,

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Things are really rough today, actually, like just practising that sentence. And not defaulting to the stuff I want to say was like, yeah, we're all right, we're going through it step by step. You know, people ask how my son is and, you know, my default is like, oh, he's fine. He's not fine, but none of us are fine. And so actually, like, opening up that pathway to let people help is in a weird way, a way of being generous to other people because they do, they do want to help. Yeah, I've started, I've started to say practical things like, you know, could you maybe come around and just play cards with, with someone this afternoon, like, or, you know, if you're free.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Everyone would love some company, honestly. Or if people come around, I always now say, can you just give me a hand with the washing up before you go? Cause I've just done so much of it lately. Nobody minds, nobody minds. And, and it's a way of communicating that I'm exhausted. I'm at the end of my tether and I could actually do with a little care. Like it's okay to need a little care. And I know that I have given care to all of those people in the past and very gladly. And it's, it's letting them in, it's giving them a little crack that they can just, you know, just glimpse what you're going through and, and do something.

• 27:32Chris Duffy?

  There's another kind of odd way that people react to, to dark times, to winters that I want to ask you about. I, I often feel like people are very well set up to understand and care and help you if it is a clear, acute problem. My foot is broken and the cast will be off in three weeks. People a hundred percent know what to do and they're so comfortable with that. It's much harder when it's I'm in pain and no one understands why. And it's been four months and it might be four years. At a certain point, people seem to say, well, that's just your deal. I don't want to hear about it anymore.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:18Chris Duffy?

  Yeah.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:18Chris Duffy?

  That's how it goes.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  That's, there's a book called The Wounded Storyteller. I don't know if you've ever come across it, but that book makes the point that the illness is a narrative experience. Essentially, there are loads of different narratives that can come from it. But one of the key narratives is chaos. Like, we are rarely given in our illnesses, a very simple beginning, middle and end story. You know, the hero, the hero's journey doesn't, doesn't often really apply to illness. It's often random, chaotic. It goes here and there. We think we're getting better and then we're not, you know, we aren't feeling great about ourselves. So we're not behaving particularly heroically about it.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  And acknowledging those more, more chaotic narratives is so, so tough. I mean, we, you know, my husband's been sick for like nearly six months now. And it's really interesting seeing people's reaction to the diagnosis because it's not changing anything materially about how he feels and what he's able to do. But now we're getting, this sounds so bitter and I don't mean it to, but like now people are offering help that we've needed all along, honestly. But it's just so much easier for us as humans to process a name. And for some illnesses, people don't get a name for it forever or for years.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Or they get a really unsatisfying name for it that doesn't, it feel like it even nearly covers it. And there's no treatment plan and there's no cure, you know. We we find it very, very hard to conceptualize the vast majority of illnesses.

• 30:01Chris Duffy?

  For people who aren't familiar with the hero's journey or the the narrative arc, can you just give us a little bit of a brief understanding of that?

• 30:08Speaker 01

  It's the idea that the kind of traditional story contains a hero who is who goes through a series of tests and who essentially like there's there's always a kind of moment of doubt and refusal of the mission, but ultimately they triumph. I mean, that's the that's the kind of the very, very compact form of it. My lectures were always often about how problematic that is, like and how it often represents, you know, a sort of imagined male lifestyle rather than the heroine, but also how kind of boring that story gets. You know, I I spend a lot of time annoying my family going, right, just pause the film now. I'm going to tell you what's going to happen next. Because once you have a sort of a knowledge of that hero's

• 30:53Speaker 01

  journey, films become very, very predictable. The good old Hollywood movie is like, oh, yeah, they're about to get separated, you know. And everyone's like, oh, come on, why do you have to do this? Like, for smug reasons is why I have to do it.

• 31:08Chris Duffy?

  Those are some of the best reasons, I believe, in life.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Listen, you've got to take what you can get in this life. But yeah, the the truth is that real life journeys, real life narrative arcs are rarely like that very heroic narrative. And we rarely get this moment of simple triumph, you know, that we might be led to expect that that we can hope for. And in fact, the gifts are more complicated than that. I always liked John York's book about storytelling called Into the Woods. If you're if you're going to study narrative, that's my favorite, because he says that a story, and I'm about to badly misquote him, but is the process of going into the woods and bringing something back for your home.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  So it's the journey is there, but the gift that you bring back is complex and not necessarily what you expected to get, but it it does sit right in the middle of of your existence.

• 32:08Chris Duffy?

  I love that. Also, when I was, you know, when I was trying to to process all of the the things that had happened to to us and figure things out, I talked to my friend Emma, who's a quite brilliant therapist, and she was just asking me very kindly how things were and where we were at. And if things were kind of stabilizing, I think that was true, it was stabilizing. And I said, I think that we we might be out of the woods. And something that she said that I've thought about so many times, even when we're not in hard times, is she said, I don't think that you ever leave the woods. You just go to nicer or less nice parts of the woods. But you're always in the woods.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  And also, the woods are great. Like, let's not diss the woods either. I mean, this is the this is the thing.

• 32:51Chris Duffy?

  People pay a lot of money to get to a cabin in the woods.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  But like, I always think about Full Fathom Five from The Tempest, you know, full fathom five, thy father lies of his bones are corals made. They once were pearls that are his eyes, none of them that doth fade, but do suffer a sea change into something rich and strange. And at times like this, that's the poem that goes through my mind because this it's about transformation and it's about something odd coming out of it quite often. But there's a richness to that existence. And we we can't just discard the richness of that, because it really does take us to the core of of of being a person, I think.

• 33:34Chris Duffy?

  I love that. It's also you've you've fulfilled the dream of any American speaking to anyone from the UK is that somehow they would quote Shakespeare to us.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  I'm a little bit embarrassed. I'm sorry.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  That's just what, that's what rolls through my head right now.

• 33:48Chris Duffy?

  Don't worry, I'll, I'll, I'll reference something in Texas and say yee-haw later on. So we'll, we'll both have fulfilled our duties.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  I would appreciate that. That would be really nice. Thanks.

• 33:55Chris Duffy?

  Absolutely. Necessary. Um, there's a, a moment in, another moment in Wintering where you're, you're talking to a friend and she's telling you that, um, her doctor has essentially said to her that this isn't about getting you fixed. It's about living the best life you can with the parameters that you have. And I think that's something that people don't often think about, right? It's always like, this hero's journey is about like, you get back to better than you ever were before. It's all resolved. And the real life version of this is sometimes not that it's fixed. It's sometimes that, how can you still have a, a good and meaningful and purposeful life?

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Absolutely. That was daughter who had lived for years with bipolar. And what, what's really fascinating about that was that having for years tried all these different treatments and therapies and approaches and nothing had worked. And she was left with this kind of increasing sense of desolation about what she could possibly be going forward. It was having a doctor that was brave enough to say to her, this might be as good as it gets. Like, how do you adapt to this life, this, this life that you've been given? That was this point at which her life suddenly got way better because she then started to genuinely adapt. And I mean, she, I talked to her in the book about her cold swimming, which

• 35:15Speaker 01

  I mean, I love swimming in cold water, but she really, really loves swimming in cold water. But it's how she learnt to actually make herself happy rather than to ask other people to make her happy. And I think that fascinated me that, that it was by absorbing the truth that did that for her rather than anything else. You know, we talk so much about hope. Like, I don't concern myself with hope. I concern myself with.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Dealing with what's in front of me, honestly.

• 35:48Speaker 02

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• 37:33Chris Duffy?

  Catherine, I could talk to you about wintering for days and not run out of things to ask you, but I do also want to talk to you about your other book, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, which, to my mind, enchantment is about how to move from one of these difficult and dark periods in your life into something a little bit more joyful and light. But I'm curious to know, what question were you writing enchantment to answer?

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I think probably two questions. One is, you know, what happens next? Like, what's the dot, dot, dot after a wintering? Because I began at the end of the book to deal with the idea of Thor. But how does that actually look? And how do we come back even more connected? Like even feeling that stuff even more deeply? Like, how do we not lose those insights that have begun to grow in us during a wintering? But I think on a personal level, for me, I was writing Enchantment in the middle of lockdowns, like successive lockdowns.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  And just thinking, you know, what can I say now about this world that is so unpredictable? And that really feels like the pot is being stirred.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  And a world where I, you know, I didn't know what life was going to look like when this book landed. You write a book and it's more than a year until it comes out. And at, and at that point, it felt

• 39:01Speaker 01

  it could have been anything. And it actually still does. Like it has that, that sense of enormous changes carried on, I think, really. And I, I was looking for what I could say that would carry on working, whatever was happening. And that's what drew me to think about not the big stuff, but actually the small and the local and the personal. And, and like looking in your own backyard for wonder, rather than going out and finding it on a special expedition or whatever it is we think we need to do these days.

• 39:37Chris Duffy?

  This, again, it, it so deeply hits at a core of what I believe. You know, for more than a decade, I've been a comedian and working in professionally, like as a comedy writer and doing stand up. And, you know, I, I think that I actually really struggled after my own winter to think like, how do I reconcile the comedy with the lessons of the wintering? I think that I really came to find that like you, for me, I can hold all of that. I can hold the things that I learned and experience this delight, this enchantment, right?

• 40:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:12Chris Duffy?

  With looking at the world and seeing the absurdity and not denying the hard parts, but realizing that like for me, laughter and humor is the way that you release the tension and continue doing that necessary work that has the A that leads to B that leads to C that has to get done so that you can just survive. For me, this is, that's my answer.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes loads of sense to me. I mean, I, we, we have this weird idea that serious things are not funny. And I, I actually think that the most serious things are often the most funny. And I

• 40:43Chris Duffy?

  A hundred percent agree.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  You know, and I'm, I'm such a believer in gallows humor. Like I think it is this amazing human function that we have to, that helps us to cope. I, I never believe in any story that has no humor in it. You know, like people don't deal with things deadpan. They deal with things by making terrible jokes. Like that's definitely the way I cope with everything. Yeah, there's been a lot of lung cancer jokes in my house lately. They would not be appropriate for anyone outside our living room, but, but they're, they're really important to us. We need, we need it because we, it's how you, it's how you like acclimatize yourself to the language. You try stuff out, you know, and every now and then one of us will crack a joke that

• 41:29Speaker 01

  goes a bit far and we'll all be like, a bit like, too soon. But that's really important too. We, we really, we're really needing those jokes right now.

• 41:39Chris Duffy?

  And that I think is such an important piece, right? It's not like everyone should be able to make you laugh about your thing. It's that you should be able to find your people and laugh together.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Definitely, definitely. And, and actually. Making jokes allows you to voice the otherwise unvoicable, to voice the really grim parts of your experience, because it's so hard to get those words out, you know, and a off colour joke will deliver it. And laughter is a release of tension and emotion as well, of course, which I, it's a, it's a release of strong feeling.

• 42:18Chris Duffy?

  What are some other forms of enchantment that people can find when they're trying to come out of these times?

• 42:23Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I structured the book after a long, long, long writing journey. I ended up structuring the book around the elements, the classical elements, earth, water, fire and air. And I, that's actually quite a good, a kind of good guide. Like, how can you make contact with what those things mean to you? One of the simplest is earth. Like, I, I, there's a chapter about taking off your shoes and just touching the ground with bare feet. And how, you know, we all do that when we hit a beach, you know, because we don't want sand in our shoes. But actually, we forget to do that other times. And I, like, one of the simplest, I kicked off my shoes as I'm speaking now, it's irresistible. One of

• 43:05Speaker 01

  the simplest ways that you can just make contact with the actual earth again, and join yourself to the, the planet that is supporting you all the time is just taking off your shoes. Your feet are so sensitive. And, and yet, like, we get in our heads about, like, what our feet look like instead, you know? Oh, if I painted my toenail, that's probably not one of your concerns, but definitely one of mine. We have all these opportunities around us to just make contact. We don't have to load it with loads of meaning. We don't have to have a guru to show us how to do it. We don't have to have like a text to explain it. You can just rely on the feedback of your own senses. And, and for me, that's such an important insight. And I get so far away from that so often before I just think.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Walk barefoot around the garden again for five minutes, you will feel better. Also, the experience of being in contact with water is always transformative. Even if sometimes it's just plunging your feet into a bowl of water, you know, at the end of a long day, baths, showers, swimming, going out in the rain, you know, all of those things. Different people will love different parts of that, but water always makes you think about fluidity. It has to. And it also is a, is a like a profoundly temperature changing experience as well.

• 44:29Chris Duffy?

  Hmm. It makes me think that I was visiting some friends who live in Austin, Texas, and I jumped into this body of water there, Barton Springs, this public body of water. It's cold and it felt incredible. And I popped out and I just went, yeehaw.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  You promised you'd yeehaw me.

• 44:45Chris Duffy?

  I promised I'd do it for you. So there you go. Now we can end the podcast. Catherine May, what a, what an absolute delight it has been to talk to you. Thank you for your work and for your time and for your gifts.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you. It's been lovely. And thank you for the yeehaw at the end. I just love that.

• 45:04Chris Duffy?

  That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Katherine May. Two of her books are Wintering and Enchantment, and I highly, highly, highly recommend them. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects at ChrisDuffyComedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team who is cooler than cool. They are ice cold. On the TED side, we've got Snow Angels, Daniela Balarezzo, Banban Cheng, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey Lott, Tanzika Sungmanivon, Antonio Le and Joseph DeBryan. This episode was fact checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas, who warmed themselves by the light of the truth. On the PRX side, they're chill, they're enchanting, they're electric. Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks

• 45:49Chris Duffy?

  again to you for listening. Please share this episode with a person who you think would appreciate it. And please, take care of yourselves and take care of other people, too. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Until then, thanks for listening.

• 46:08Chris Duffy?

  This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them, in and out of court. And that fight needs your support today. Donate at N R D C dot org slash human and your gift will be matched five times.

• 46:57Speaker 02

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• 47:42Speaker 02

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