How to Be a Better Human - How to rest when life is overwhelming (w/ Katherine May)

Episode Date: August 25, 2025

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.FollowHost: Chris Duffy (Instagram: @chrisiduffy | chrisduffycomedy.com)Guest: Katherine May (Instagram: @katherinemay_ | Website: katherine-may.co.uk/) LinksWintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times (UK Bookshop / US & CAN Bookshop)Enchantment: Reawakening Wonder in an Exhausted Age (UK Bookshop / US & CAN Bookshop)Subscribe to TED Instagram: @tedYouTube: @TEDTikTok: @tedtoksLinkedIn: @ted-conferencesWebsite: ted.comPodcasts: ted.com/podcastsFor the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscriptsFor a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyou Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 head. heavy sweater on the street, and then right next to them, someone wearing just shorts in 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 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 Catherine 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. 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 gradual ratcheting up of caring responsibilities as our parents' age, the drip, 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. 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.

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podcasts. We're talking with Catherine May about the inevitability of difficult seasons in your life and how to survive those seasons when they come. Hi, I'm Catherine May, author of Wintering and Enchantment. 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, winter. That's how I've described your book when I'm 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? 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, or 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 felt very numb and very dislocated. 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. 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 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 says, okay, so why is that their fault? Like, what would I have done differently?

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 do seem to be like a very guilt-laden species in the first place. And we don't allow ourselves any other exit route, really. I want to read a few quotes 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. In 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. 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. 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. You know, 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 because, as Alan Watts says, like a lot of the pain that we experience is the running from the pain. That is the kind of very 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. I will. I will.

will have gained in, like, wisdom and the rich experience of the world. 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. I think this is the kind of conversation where it actually really helps sometimes to be specific and personal. So I try sometimes to not make it all about me, but I think just to share a particularly dark winter for me was my wife had gotten very ill and mysteriously with injuries and chronic pain and it had led to her essentially not being able to take care of herself 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, 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 you're getting more and more exhausted and you're just actually losing ground. Yeah. The metaphor I used quite frequently was that I am using 100% 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 it is a season. But 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. Yeah, yeah, that's a trigger point for me. You know, like, I would try and tell someone how absolutely horrific things were. And they'd be like, you're going to get through this and be stronger on the other side. And I was like, I could rip your jugular vein out right now. 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 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 any help I can get. Because as you say, like illness is exhausting for everybody in the household, you know, least of all the person who's actually sick. 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 want to 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 rather than kind of jumping to hang on in there you'll cut you'll be able to tough it out you know this is going to 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 yeah yeah 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. 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 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 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. 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. 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, this is agony. This is awful. I am in pain. okay yeah that's how we look each other in the eye then isn't it that's that is the stuff that we've got in common 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 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. 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. You know, 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, you know, 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. 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. We have got a lot more conversation coming up in just a moment. But first, we're going to take another quick break.

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confident smile. This podcast is brought to you by Wise, the app for international people using money around the globe. With Wise, you can send, spend, and receive up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Plus, Wise won't add hidden fees to your transfer. Whether you're buying souvenirs with pesos and Puerto Vallarta or sending euros to a loved one in Paris, you know you're getting a fair exchange rate with no extra markups. Be smart. Join the 15 million customers who choose Wise. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. Terms and conditions apply. We're talking with Catherine May, author of the book's 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.

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. 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. 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. there's there's this interesting phenomena 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 this the classic is to listen to a breakup song but 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 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. 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 be beauty in these moments and just the tiniest, tiniest thing can just feel transcendent for a few moments. And I do think that one of the factors of a wintering that we ignore is how emotionally varied they are. You know, like 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. 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 where we are right now. And I had a palette 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 can 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. And I was so moved by that.

You know, like 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 just know that you'd be struggling with that and to just pop out of their house and carry stuff in for you 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 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? 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 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 just any.

any person, but the people that I'm actually close to who do, who I know really care, saying, learning to say, things are really rough today, actually, like just practicing that sentence and not defaulting to the stuff I want to say. We're 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 want to help. Yeah, I've started to say practical things. Like, you know, could you maybe come around and just play cards with someone this afternoon? Like, or, you know,

if you're free, 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? Because I've just done so much of it lately, nobody minds. Nobody minds. 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 do something 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 you. 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. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's how it goes. 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 expression. 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 an end story. You know, the hero, the hero's journey 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. We're not, not behaving particularly heroically about it. And acknowledging those 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 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 find it very, very hard. to conceptualise the vast majority of illnesses. For people who aren't familiar with the hero's journey or the narrative arc, can you just give us a little bit of a brief understanding of that? It's the idea that the kind of traditional story contains a hero who goes through a series of tests and who essentially, like, there's always a kind of moment of doubt and refusal of the mission, but ultimately they triumph. I mean, that's the kind of the very, very compact form of it.

My lectures were always often about how problematic that is 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 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 journey, films become very, very predictable. The good old Hollywood movie is like, oh, yeah, they're about to get separated, you know. And it was like, oh, come on, why do you have to do this? Like, the smug reasons is why I have to do it. Those are some of the best reasons, I believe, in life.

Listen, you've got to take what you can get in this life. But, yeah, 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 we can hope for. And in fact, the gifts are more complicated than that. I always like John York's book about storytelling called Into the Woods. If you're going to study narrative, that's my favourite. 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. 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 does sit right in the middle of your existence. I love that. Also, when I was, you know, when I was trying to to process all of the things that had happened 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 things were kind of stabilizing. I think that was true. It was stabilizing. And I said, I think that 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. And also, the woods are great. Like, let's not diss the woods either. I mean, this is the thing. People pay a lot of money to get to a cabin in the woods. But like I always think about Full Fathom Five from The Tempest, you know. Full Fathom Five, their father lies of his bones of corals made. They once were pearls that are his eyes.

None of them that doth fade, but does 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 being a person, I think. I love that. It's also, you've fulfilled the dream of any American speaking to anyone from the UK is that somehow they would quote Shakespeare to us. I'm a little bit embarrassed. I'm sorry. That's just, that's what rolls through my head right now.

Don't worry. I'll reference something in Texas and say, yehaw later on. So we'll both have fulfilled our duties. I would appreciate that. That would be really nice. Absolutely. Necessary. There's a moment in another moment in wintering where you're talking to a friend. And she's telling you that 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 good and meaningful and purposeful life? Absolutely. That was daughter who had lived for years with bipolar. And what's really fascinating about that was that having for years tried all these different treatments and therapies and approaches and nothing had worked.

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 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, I talked to her in the book about her cold swimming, which, I mean, I love swimming in cold water, but she really, really, really. love 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 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 dealing with what's in front of me, honestly. Our homes are ready for any kind of cuts. We have bandages, sprays, gels to treat them. But we're quick to ignore gum bleeding and inflammation. We brush it off, literally. Use Colgate Periogard to significantly reduce gum bleeding and inflammation.

It helps fight bacteria that can lead to early gum disease and improves gum health with daily use. So, the next time your gums feel sensitive, don't ignore it. Help take care of it with Colgate Periogard. Healthy gums, confident smile. You want in on a secret all year. It's been bro podcast this and bro podcast that. Here's what they're not telling you.

Women are the fastest growing force in podcasts. I'm Brittany Luce, and on the It's Been a Minute podcast, I create a space for curious and culturally savvy listeners like you. Come and share a laugh with me and hundreds of thousands of other listeners as we dissect the biggest trends of the day. Let's get smarter together. Listen to the It's Been a Minute podcast today. 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? 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 began 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, 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? And a world where, 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 that point, it felt could have been anything. And it actually still does. It has that sense of enormous changes carried on, I think, really. And 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 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. This again, 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 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? 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 to 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. Yeah, that makes loads of sense to me. I mean, 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, you know, and I'm such a believer in Gallo's humor. Like, I think it is this amazing human function that we have to, that helps us to cope. I never believe in any story that has no humour 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 they're really important to us. 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 goes a bit far and we'll be like a bit like too soon.

But that's really important too. We're really needing those jokes right now. 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. Definitely. Definitely. And actually, making jokes allows you to voice the otherwise unvocible, to voice the really grim parts of your experience, because it's so hard to get those words out, you know, and an off-color joke will deliver it. And laughter is a release of tension and emotion as well, of course,

which I, it's a release of strong feeling. What are some other forms of enchantment that people can find when they're trying to come out of these times? I mean, I structured the book after a 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, 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 at other times. And I, like, one of the simplest, I kicked off my shoes as I'm speaking now, it's irresistible.

One of the simplest ways that you can just make contact with the actual earth again and join yourself to the plan. it that is supporting you all the time is just taking off your shoes. Your feet are so sensitive. And yet, like, we get in our heads about, like, what our feet look like instead. You know, oh, have I painted my toe now? 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 for me that's such an important insight and I get so far away from that so often before I just think 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 bath, 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 like a profoundly temperature changing experience as well. It makes me think that I was visiting some friends who live in Austin, Texas, and I jumped into this body of water there at Barton Springs, this public. public body water. It's cold and it felt incredible. And I popped out and I just went, Yeehaw! You promised you'll jehah me. I promised I'd do it for you. So there you go. Now we can end the podcast. Catherine May, what an absolute delight it has been to talk to you. Thank you for your work and for your time and for your gifts. Oh, thank you. It's been lovely. And thank you

for the yaha at the end. I just love that. That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest. Catherine 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 Chris Duffy Comedy.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, Danielle Balerezzo, Ban Ban-Banchang, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Lani Latt, Tanzika Sung, Sun Minivong, and Tonya and Joseph DeBrine.

This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dicker and Mateus Salas, who warm themselves by the light of the truth. On the PRX side, they're chill, they're enchanting, they're electric. Morgan Flannery, Norgill, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks 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.

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