Enchantment and Wonder

When I asked a younger friend, "Do you ever wake up feeling agitated for no particular reason?" she answered without hesitation, "God, yes!"

Later, I read a few pages in a book called Enchantment, Awakening Wonder in An Anxious Age by Katherine May:

"Lately, I can't read a whole page of a book.  It is frictionless, this sliding of attention. I thought it would resolve once the lockdown ended, but it did not.  It's as if some kind of lubrication has been applied to my choices.  I intend to do one thing, but my unconscious shunts me discretely away. It has other plans for me.  I am supposed to be watching, I am supposed to be looking over my shoulder, alert to the next threat."

Isn't this a conversation we're all having?  Why do we feel different after Trump was elected, after January 6th 2021, after COVID, after lockdown, school murders with assault weapons happening every week? Older people might assume that anxiety comes with aging, illness, caring for others, or losses.  

When people twenty and thirty years younger are expressing the same feeling, I realize that a kind of homesickness feeling has hit us all.  

But the book has a subtitle: Enchantment, Awakening Wonder. 

I will let you know what I discover in these pages.