Waiting is ubiquitous in human experience right from our very start. For nine months we gestate in our mother’s womb, waiting to be born. Likewise, at the end of our lives, we wait for death. Every day in a variety of situations, we wait. We wait for the sun to replace the moon, for buds to blossom, for our house to sell, for our carrots to grow. We wait for a lover to call, for the mail to be delivered; we wait for the taxi to arrive and the plane to be on time. We wait in traffic jams and doctors’ offices. We wait for the signs of puberty, the first rattlings of death.

Waiting is colored by the emotion we attach to the experience. We say we feel stuck or pissed, bored or angry. The supermarket line seems to take forever. “Take forever” is one of our favorite descriptors of waiting.

We wait in public and we wait in private. Waiting is a mental space unlike any other: in waiting we find ourselves in uncertainty, between the anticipated and the hoped for, between stasis and action, and our response to waiting often registers as cranky restlessness.

Journalist Andrea Köhler has written a book called Passing Time: An Essay on Waiting, in which she reflects on aspects of waiting. “What I am interested in is the kind of waiting that falls squarely within the realm of individual experience, which in today’s world, faces the paradox of overabundance of too little time.” The paradox here is something most of us know: that while we pack more and more into our busy lives, we feel more dogged than ever by the pressure to keep up. Under such conditions, waiting becomes maddening, a personal affront.

Köhler reminds us that waiting anticipates loss and the fear of separation. Waiting, she observes, is anxiety’s sister. Using Freud as a guide, she refers us back to childhood, to our first experience of our mother’s absence. We are in a crib. We cry out. Mother does not hear our distress. Waiting for our mother induces terror. Of this primal terror, Köhler writes: “Only a brief instant presumably separates the moment when the child believes his mother to be merely absent from the moment when it thinks she is dead. Whenever we have to wait for someone we love, we are subcutaneously thrown back upon this experience. Thus, waiting evokes the curse of a threat going back to childhood.”

But do we have to think of waiting as passive and anxiety-provoking? Financial writer Frank Partnoy would have us consider the benefits of delay. His book, Wait: The Art and Science of Delay, suggests that rashness is not our friend. Deep reflection requires time. Decision-making requires time and a space in which we can observe, contemplate and process information. Partnoy writes:

“Thinking about the role of delay is a profound and fundamental part of being human. Questions about delay are existential: the amount of time we take to reflect on decisions will define who we are. Is our mission simply to be another animal, responding to whatever stimulations we encounter? Or are we here for something more? Our ability to think about delay is a central part of the human condition. It is a gift, a tool we can use to examine our lives. Life might be a race against time, but it is enriched when we rise above our instincts and stop the clock to process and understand what we are doing and why.”

What’s our rush? The answer has to do with our relationship to time. Time fleets, races, gallops or drags. We spend time or grieve its absence. Sometimes, time stands still. Technology and modernization have changed how we experience time. As novelist and historian Eva Hoffman writes in Time: “As we move through time with more speed and freedom, temporality becomes increasingly severed from natural cycles of years, days and seasons. In jet travel we conflate night and day without regard to the twenty-four-hour cycle. . . . But our cognition of time is no longer even linked to the time through which we physically move. Rather, our experience of temporality is becoming increasingly deterritorialised and virtual.”

Waiting can be empty and meaningless or full of richness and meaning. Engagement with the present moment, to what’s right here in front of us—the tree next to the bench at the bus stop where we sit waiting, the child’s quizzical face in the waiting room—offer opportunities to acknowledge and feel the life pulsing within and around us. Buddhist monk and teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh teaches us that when we see a flower, if we pause, wait, and cultivate a meditative moment to look deeply into that flower, we will see not only its shape and color, but we see the sunshine, rain and soil that are also part of the flower and part of us as well. This “looking deeply into” can become a practice while we wait, wherever we are. We can bring our awareness to the quality of clouds while we are in crawling traffic; we can sit with our morning coffee and savor its aroma, feel the weight of the mug in our hands. In these moments when we abide with ourselves, the urge to do, to be somewhere else, subsides. Our breath, our heartbeats slow down. We are not waiting for time to pass; waiting is our friend.

French philosopher Gaston Bachelard takes us a step further in considering the necessity and profundity of time suspended. Tempo giusto, the unrushed time of childhood, or what Bachelard calls reverie, a time-outness in which the preoccupations of everyday life and worries are swept aside and “time no longer has any yesterday and no longer any tomorrow.”(The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos).

Beloved poet Mary Oliver is our spirit guide in reminding us to remain open to the world’s dazzlement; that is, to pause, wait and wonder. To allow the mundane to show us its enchantment. Here is her famous poem “Wild Geese” from her book Dream Work. Poetry opens us to a lyric moment, into the timeless realm beyond waiting where image, music, and revelation meet. Next time you think you might be in for a wait, take a book of poetry with you. You may find that your mind will be happy you did.

Wild Geese 

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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Words, like everything else, go in and out of fashion. And sometimes it’s a good idea to rummage through the basement of expired words to see if they still have juice in them.

Such is my inquiry into the concept of enchantment. Ask most Americans what the word conjures and the most common response involves a Disney image: Tinker Bell casting a stream of magical dust in her wake; Peter and Wendy flying off to Neverland. Glass coffins, dancing teacups, talking mirrors; genies and jinns and a super-powered broom.  The origins of these images pre-date the genius of Walt Disney. Leprechauns, fire-spitting dragons and fairies filled and thrilled the medieval and early modern imagination. To curry favor from the spirits, the Celts hung bits of clothing on trees; throwing coins or buttons into water—wishing wells—has ancient roots.

As modern Western societies evolved, the belief in spells and charms, marvels and wonders became discredited, associated with groups thought by the dominant culture to be inferior—women, children, lower classes, and so-called “primitives.” By the seventeenth century, the new Newtonian world embraced rationalism, scientism, and industrialization. As the ideas of the Enlightenment took hold, education elevated and rewarded the fastidious regard for scientific proof and rational thought and discounted the irrational fictions of animism, superstition and orthodox religious beliefs.

In a 1917 lecture, the great social theorist Max Weber popularized a phrase that translates from the German as “the disenchantment of the world.” Weber used it to push back against the conviction that reason and science could explain all natural and human phenomena. This intellectualized view, he worried, would result in a world rendered poorer of mystery and richness. In Weber’s view, disenchantment corresponded to a depleted and shrunken universe, one that held that all things are knowable, explainable, and manipulable, that we live in a universe governed by knowable natural laws and mastered by human will. By contrast, Weber believed that the world was a “great enchanted garden.”

A few years after Weber’s lecture, the German theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto published a book titled in English, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Divine and its Relation to the Rational. Otto adopted the term numinous, based on the Latin word numen (divine power) to describe an experience of awe and surprise, “a non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self.” By definition, enchantment refers to being under a magic spell or charm, a feeling of great pleasure or delight. While this definition is not the same as Otto’s notion of the numinous, both concepts relate to how we position our egos vis-à-vis a vast non-ego-directed universe.

Otto’s idea of the numinous also has some similarities with the mystical experiences described by the psychologist William James in his famous book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Like Weber and Otto, James did not dismiss rational and conceptual processes, but neither did he dismiss the value of subjective, often ecstatic, experiences in which one is “shaken free from the cage of self.” The mystical experiences James described were inner, private encounters with Otherness and illustrate an alternative way of “knowing” not based on an objective perspective. While science and rational thought would have us know the world by standing apart from it and viewing it from the outside, mystical experiences establish a mutuality between perceiver and perceived, demolishing the boundary between self and world.

Writing about ecstatic/mystical experience as an archetypal need in The Reenchantment of Art, the artist and cultural critic Suzi Gablik has written:

Our loss of ecstatic experience in contemporary Western society has affected every aspect of our lives and created a sense of closure, in which there seems to be no alternative, no hope, and no exit from the addictive system we have created. In our man-made environments, we have comfort and luxury, but there is little ecstasy—the cumulative effects of our obsession with mechanism offer no room for such a way of life. Ecstatic experience puts us in touch with the soul of the world and deepens our sense that we live in the midst of a cosmic mystery.

Enchantment, then, characterizes a worldview and also describes a state of being. We post-moderns may be less inclined than our predecessors to suspend our systems of belief and face into the unknown, yet our psyches still desire to explore the unknown and unknowable. We seem to have an innate desire for a connection to a benevolent force outside ourselves. In times of distress—when we receive a frightening diagnosis or find ourselves in the thrall of a great passion— even non-believers often turn to wishes, prayers, poetry, and petitions for help.  This non-rational instinct, similar to what Carl Jung called the archetype of the religious function, might well be a psychic and somatic memory passed down from our ancestors. Our babushka grandmother who spits in the soup for good luck may trigger our ridicule and disdain, but even if enchantment has gone underground in our consciousness, the hunger for it remains alive.

Enchantment is a concept worth reexamining. These days we are more familiar with feelings of disenchantment, which holds hands with disillusionment and, ultimately, despair. To many of us, enchantment is a sissy word, a deluded nostalgia associated with hokum—conjurors and Ouija boards, snake oil peddlers and spiritualist gurus. And while scam artists, Ponzi schemers and the like abound, as Leo Tolstoy has written: “If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.” My suspicion is that our capacity to be enchanted is crucial to our mental, spiritual, and perhaps even our physical well-being, as this capacity opens a wedge of hope in an otherwise mechanistic and material existence.

What might enchantment look like in your life? Where can you find it? A walk in the woods? An afternoon at a potter’s wheel? Music? In most cultures chanting, drumming, dancing and music restore us to the wild aliveness of enchantment.

In Carson McCullers’ acclaimed novel, The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, Mick Kelley, a tomboyish thirteen-year-old of deep feeling and sensibility, discovers rapture in music she hears while passing a neighbor’s open window. She is in pain. Her awakening to adolescence is coupled with an awakening to the sorrows and rages of the adults around her. Mick wanders down the dark summer streets and comes to a house she has been to many times before, a house in which a radio plays. McCullers tells us:

Mick sat on the ground. This was a very fine and secret place. Close around her were thick cedars so that she was completely hidden by herself. The radio was no good tonight—somebody sang popular songs that all ended in the same way. It was like she was empty. She reached in her pockets and felt around with her fingers…It was like she was so empty there wasn’t even a feeling or thought in her.

The word “empty” is repeated twice in the above passage. Mick is emptied of her old identity, her old ways of knowing, and this emptying out is preparation for what comes next—in the lush summer evening, hidden by trees, sequestered from the ordinary world and shorn of her persona, Mick is being reborn. Here is an image of the soul in reverie. Solitude is a necessary component for the soul’s manifestation.

What occurs next in Mick’s story is a miraculous description of rapture, unexpected, but not unprepared for. Mick’s feet have brought her to this house without her knowing.

One program came on after another and all of them were punk. She smoked and picked a little bunch of grass blades. After a while a new announcer started talking. He mentioned Beethoven…The announcer said they were going to play his third symphony…she didn’t care much what they played. Then the music started. Mick raised her head and her fist went up to her throat.

Mick listens some more . . .

For a minute the opening balanced from one side to the other. Like a walk or a march. Like God strutting in the night. The outside of her was suddenly froze and only the first part of the music was hot inside her heart. […] It didn’t have anything to do with God. This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. This music was her—the real plain her.

Then she thinks The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.

Finding your way to enchantment might be a thrilling project. Consider that your capacity to be enchanted has never been lost. Enchantment has much to teach us about hidden wonders blocked by our over-analytical minds. Enchantment asks to release us into a world beyond thought in which new perceptions and sensations lead the way to awe. Right now, let yourself muse on the possibility of enchantment. In the words of French poet Paul Éluard: “There is another world, but it is in this one.”

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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Enchantment. I hope the word sends a thrill up your spine! When was the last time your conversation turned to enchantment? Who talks about enchantment these days? That may be one of the reasons it interests me. As a writer, I’m interested in what isn’t being said in the public sphere—the unsaid and the unspoken.

The German philosopher Wittgenstein explored the subject of enchantment. According to him, enchantment transports us beyond our finite selves. To be enchanted, he wrote, was “to show the fly the way out of the bottle.” To show the fly the way out of the bottle! The French poet Paul Eluard said, “There is another world, but it is in this one.” I agree. Enchantment is with us here, now.

And yet we seem so attracted to enchantment’s opposites—cynicism, irony, mistrust—qualities that show up in lots of contemporary fictional characters who reflect our twenty-first century discouraged and disenchanted point of view. Enchantment, instead, would have us stand in the place of wonder and consider ourselves apprentices in the mystery of Being.

I’ll share a recent discovery—the role enchantment has played in my writing—and how the enchanted state in a writer, in this case me, seeps into the work itself. Another way of saying this is that what’s in the psyche of the writer shows up transmuted on the page. Transmuted is key because sometimes only the slightest aroma of the original idea is evident in the final written form. Think of it this way: The rapture expressed in Mozart’s The Magic Flute is directly related to the rapture Mozart presumably felt while composing it. If Mozart was filled with rapture, rapture will be in his music.

There’s plenty of enchantment going on in my novel The Conditions of Love. (Check out Mr. Tabachnik’s relationship to opera, or Eunice and Rose’s relationship to the natural world, or Mern’s intoxication with Hollywood.) I myself was in an enchanted state while writing a lot of the book, but I also admit that my characters, in turn, enchanted me. This is the moment when I might explain that the novel’s origins began when I started to hear voices, but that’s another story for another time.

This writer has experienced her most enchanted states at our cabin in the north woods where much of The Conditions of Love was written. You might say that in solitude and stillness, my apprehension of and connection to the invisible world ripened. The wind spoke to me, the pines spoke to me, the sun-diamonds on the lake and the slap of water against the shore worked their magic. At other times while writing the novel, I took myself to foreign towns where I’d rent a bungalow and sit myself down to write. Enchantment can occur at any time, but it does seem to appreciate an escape from the familiar.

We don’t talk much about enchantment, but most of us have experienced it and still get glimpses. For example, music shares an ancient relationship to enchantment. Think: hymns, chants, rattles and drums. On a more modern note, I recently read that melody and rhythm trigger the same dopamine system in the brain that rewards food and sex. Absolutely! Who didn’t think that whirling dervishes and ecstatic dancers of every stripe were having more fun than the rest of us!  It appears neuroscience has finally caught up with what the sages always knew.

There’s so much violence and terror in the world today. “You name it, the world is aflame,” said Gary Samore, a former national-security aide in the Obama Administration, to New York Times reporter Peter Baker. I wonder where we can find an antidote to the dread and doom? Where can we look for relief? Couldn’t an engagement with enchantment, that is, to stand in wonder at what does exist, open worlds of possibility and present a wedge of light in the darkness?

Here’s a very brief list of fiction writers who play with enchantment in their work. Poets need their own list.

Suggested reading:

Lewis Carroll: The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland

Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities

Steven Millhauser: Little Kingdoms; The Knife Thrower and Other Stories

Louise Erdrich: The Plague of Doves

Tea Olbrecht: The Tiger’s Wife

anything by Jorge Luis Borges or Edgar Allan Poe

anything by Angela Carter

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