(and Other Truths I Need to Hear)
Gain inspiration from one woman’s battle with cancer and the spiritual lessons she learned along the way.
Kate Bowler understood better than most that there is no easy fix for the anguish and messiness that come from simply being human.
As a professor, she'd authored books criticizing self-help gurus and evangelicals who said you could pray your way to your "best life." In truth, she was convinced that the modern concept of "living your best life" was toxic and superficial.
Ironically, at the age of thirty-five, Kate indeed had her finest life. She was blissfully married to her childhood lover, mother to a beloved toddler named Zach, and achieving professional success in a competitive industry.
Kate was eventually diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. Best case scenario? Two years.
Kate always knew her time on Earth was limited. But she never expected it would seem so fleeting, so quickly. As critical as she was of the concept of the "best life," Kate was now confronted with an essential question: how could she best spend the time she had left?
In this brief, you will learn.
What do the prosperity gospel and Peloton have in common?
Why you shouldn't make a bucket list; why
pain does not have to be viewed as a learning experience.
1. A crisis occurred in the hospital gift shop.
In general, hospital gift stores stock items that are not provocative. Consider beautiful potted plants, greeting cards with euphemism messages about "recovery," and books with uplifting, spiritual themes.
So, why is Kate Bowler standing in a North Carolina hospital's gift shop, dressed in a baggy cotton medical gown and trailing her IV drip behind her, surrounded by a pile of books she has selected off the shop shelves? And why is she emphatically telling the unimpressed young store staff that these books are improper if not unpleasant, reading material for a hospital gift shop?
The reason Kate is in the hospital is plainly stated on her chart. After months of unexplained abdominal pain, nausea, and severe weight loss, Kate has finally been diagnosed with cancer. Kate has stage four colon cancer, which is an incredibly awful type of cancer. Her colon is packed with malignancies, which have migrated to her liver. The survival rate for this situation is scarcely optimistic, at 14%. Even the word "survival" is a bit of a misnomer; of the fourteen percent who "survive," the majority only live for another two years. Despite her youth and - until recently - good health, Kate is living on borrowed time.
The reason she's raising a ruckus in the hospital gift shop isn't immediately apparent. However, seeing the books she's pulled from the shelves, everything becomes more evident. They are all Chrbestsellerssellers, with the majority written by individuals who preach the prosperity gospel.
The prosperity gospel argues that if you serve God faithfully, you will receive the benefits of health, riches, and happiness. This sounds simple enough, yet beneath the surface of this seemingly uplifting concept lies a very deadly subtext. If God blesses those who believe in Him, those who suffer must have caused it themselves. If you're impoverished, sad, or sick, it's assumed that your faith is lacking. If you have stage four colon cancer, the assumption is that it is your fault.
Kate is a Christian, but the prosperity gospel's beliefs have always been at odds with her own open-hearted, empathic, and welcoming form of Christianity. And, as a professor of the history of Christianity in North America, she has spent a lot of time criticizing not only the prosperity gospel but also the broader wellness and self-help industries that promote the same fundamental idea: that by making a series of choices and behaviors, you can not only control but perfect your life. You can completely prevent pain, misery, and disaster. Living your "best life" is within reach.
Of course, her concern with the concept of the best life is more than merely academic. It is personal.
2. What's wrong with "living your best life," anyway?
Let us leave Kate at the hospital gift shop for a moment. Her story will resume in the next section, where she deals with her diagnosis. To comprehend her story, you must first grasp what the concept of "best life" is and why Kate has fought against it throughout her career.
"I'm living my best life." It's become almost a catchphrase. Wellness experts, hip-hop performers, and Peloton instructors all encourage us to live our best lives. We're bombarded with advertisements for everything from cleansing juices to productivity applications, each of which claims to be the only thing we need to live our best lives. Skimming the self-help section of any bookstore offers many strategies for reaching the elusive perfect life, ranging from making friends and influencing others to reducing our professional lives into a four-hour workweek. Of course, once the "best life" - or the appearance thereof - is achieved, it must be meticulously documented on social media. #blessed, as they say.
But where did the idea of living your "best life" come from? How did so many of us come to believe that life can be perfected by just using the proper product, technique, or mindset?
The idea that we can overcome life's complexities and misfortunes via sheer willpower is not new, but its current form has its roots in the New Age movement of the 1970s. To a generation concerned with mental liberation, the idea that the mind could transcend beyond mediocrity and negativity to access a higher form of existence did not sound absurd.
This concept was institutionalized in the self-help movement in the 1980s, and it swiftly gained traction in popular culture. In fact, in 1984, the New York Times had to crbestseller-seller list just for self-help literature so that other genres may be included on the paper's rbestsellertseller list. At their root, these publications conveyed a message: you may wish to attain professional success, find romance, lose weight, or earn fortune; whether or not you can depends on your thinking. With enough will and discipline, you can overcome any situation. In other words, if you're unmarried, overweight, or stuck in your profession, the problem is yours, and only you can address it.
Joel Osteen, an evangelist and proponent of the prosperity gospel, invented the term "best life" in 2004. Since then, Instagram celebrities, reality TV contestants, wellness gurus, personal trainers, and even Oprah have all used the phrase. Why the traction? It's likely the most succinct summary of the concept that underpins contemporary narratives of self-help, wellness, and evangelism: that we have power over our lives and, with enough control, can improve them.
Kate knows the truth. Life is something you can't really control. Being human entails being untidy, making mistakes, and experiencing adversity. Every day since her cancer diagnosis, she has lived this fact. But when she considers how to spend the time she has left, she is surprised to realize how many times she has attempted to perfect and control her own life.
3. Spending time when you don't have much of it.
Before cancer, Kate's life was a succession of carefully nurtured decisions, all of which were intended to add value to her existence. Many of them were excellent choices. She had chosen to marry Toban, her childhood sweetheart and the passion of her life. They decided to establish a family together, and the end result was their darling son, Zach.
Of course, each of these options was once simply a hope or a yearning. Kate realized her goals because of her hard work and unwavering optimism. Or so she always thought. Now, with the underpinnings of her life falling underneath her, Kate realized that each meticulously planned decision was likewise supported by pure luck and chance.
Despite her diagnosis, society continues to treat her decisions as if they matter. Friends send cards that portray cancer as a winnable struggle, leading Kate to wonder if those who lost simply did not fight hard enough. Cheery memes encourage her to "kick cancer's butt!""As if she could choose to do that. Kate realizes she didn't have a choice. Cancer did. Cancer selected her.
Kate, as frustrated as she is by the prospect of having a say in how her fatal condition plays out, continues to strive to manage her existence with the same methods she has always used.
She works hard. As an academic, she tackles illness as if it were another topic to master, as if cancer that is fast spreading through her were sixteenth-century Italian politics or conversational French. Pre-cancer, she strived for professional excellence, managing work and childcare, achieving inbox zero, and receiving excellent teaching reviews. She continues to strive by reading medical articles and acquiring jargon.
She thinks favorably. She is resolved not to miss out on any good moments or significant interactions. She creates appreciation lists to capture every meaningful moment of the day and maximize delight without missing anything. But the more she attempts to capture these fleeting moments, the less she likes them.
She doesn't have much time remaining. And it gradually dawns on her that she is approaching this time in the same manner she did before cancer: as if every hour represented an opportunity for productivity. As if piling productive hour after productive hour will lead to her best life.
What exactly does it mean to make the most of the time she has left? How can she break free from her relationship with time in a society that appears to value time exclusively in terms of its potential for productivity and profit?
Kate understands that she cannot master time or her life. All she can do is go with the flow.
4. A life measured in ten significant experiences? A case against bucket lists.
Kate is sitting across from Caitlin, a mental health counselor who is gently asking her if she has any experiences or skills that she has always wanted to learn. Maybe she wants to learn oil painting, look down on Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower, or finally dance the tango. ..This last bit remains unspoken, yet it hangs in the air between them. Before time runs out.
Then Kate is given a ray of hope. She has been invited to participate in an immunotherapy trial. She is one of a limited number of colon cancer patients who may respond to a cutting-edge drug-treatment regimen. For Kate, this means flying from North Carolina to Atlanta once a week to receive a combination of chemotherapy and medication treatment. At the same time, a team of clinicians collects data, asking her to rate her pain on a scale of one to 10.
Kate has been offered mental health support as part of her experiment. As part of this assistance, Caitlin, the counselor, is encouraging her to create a bucket list. Instead of developing a list, Kate starts to question where the term "bucket list" came from. These days, a bucket list is presented as a fun checklist: learn this, see that, and go there. Check as many boxes as you can!
The expression, however, has its roots in "kick the bucket," a very nasty euphemism for "die," as persons who commit suicide occasionally push the bucket out from beneath their feet before hanging themselves. Here's the gloomy side of this cheerful concept: you have to check out all the boxes before you die. After all, if you haven't been to the Grand Canyon or produced your own cheese, have you truly lived?
This propensity has been introduced previously. In truth, it's as old as the perpetual fear that we're squandering our limited time on Earth. So, we create lists. When they're finished, we can die satisfied. The ancient Greeks made the Seven Wonders. Medieval pilgrimages were essentially a checklist of "bucket list" churches and saints' relics. There is a trend in publishing books with titles like 1001 Cities to See Before You Die. Or 1001 Movies to See, Sandwiches to Eat, and so on indefinitely.
Kate is reminded of Henry David Thoreau, who wrote that he wanted to "suck out all the marrow of life." She can't help but think that when it comes to sucking life's marrow, working through a list may be missing the purpose. Aren't bucket lists merely a method of putting order into an inherently disordered experience - being alive?
Kate is reading a book about the French Revolution in the airport lounge on yet another journey to Atlanta, and she discovers that the rebels made it their mission to establish order in the newly formed nation. Previously, France had 26 provinces of varied shapes and sizes. The fanatical revolutionaries redraw the map. Voilà ! France was now divided into 89 tidy, equal-sized "departments." However, in their rush to impose order, they had neglected culture, dialects, natural borders, communities, and the very fabric of life. Kate determines right then and there not to quantify her life experiences. Instead, she opts for the less quantifiable but more meaningful business of simply existing.
5. Is hard labor ineffective?
Kate could improve at math. She is a humanities academic who specializes in the history of Christianity in North America. She can tell you all about the emergence of megachurches and the role of women in modern evangelism. But all of a sudden, her life revolves around calculations. Impossible computations that, no matter how she balances them, have no satisfactory results.
She has responded nicely to the immunotherapy experiment. Tumors that once filled her gut and liver have shrunk. But they have not vanished. They remain a characteristic of every scan and x-ray. There's a nasty-looking growth in Kate's liver, just adjacent to a crucial cord that sends blood to her lower body.
That's where the mathematics enters in. What percentage of Kate's tumor can a surgeon remove without cutting into the adjacent chord and causing Kate to bleed out on the operating table? How much of Kate's liver can be taken before her organs fail entirely? Kate can live with how much of her tumor? How much liver can she live without?
Kate and her medical team have repeatedly attempted to solve for x. However, a solution still needs to be found.
But Kate is also undertaking other types of calculations. To gain tenure, she must complete an academic bucket list by writing two scholarly books and eight papers in seven years.
Before her illness, her time as a professor was filled with accomplishments. They're now on the back burner. However, the clock is still ticking, and her tenure dream is quickly fading.
Is tenure still her dream? She returns from medical leave and looks around her workspace. She has accomplished so much, but she has paid the price. She has a gorgeous kid, Zach, but, like the majority of her female coworkers, she hasn't had any more. She only has 24 hours in a day and is parenting one child while working toward tenure. ..Well, it just does not add up. There's the math again. Looking back at the papers she's written and the books she's read, she is bewildered by her former self, who believed she had so much time to spend. If she had understood how limited her time was, would she have spent so much of it in this academic niche? Would she have spent so much time on her work, period? Nonetheless, she feels compelled to work and finish the book she is writing.
A wise acquaintance informs her that she can spend all of her remaining time with Zach and Toban if she wishes. However, creating her book will be worthwhile. This buddy assures her that if she enjoys her profession, her husband and son will find her there as well.
This is how Kate reconciles herself with her previous and current professional choices. She understands that blind careerism is useless. But having a calling gives life purpose. Our calling can be wherever we find ourselves and where others see us. If only it weren't so difficult to tell one from the other.
Kate writes scholarly books, not novels. What occurs after her cancer diagnosis, however, is nothing short of a dramatic twist.
6. On the pointlessness of pain, or why not, everything must have a meaning.
First, the good news: Kate chose a liver resection, which means a significant, tumor-infested portion of her liver will be removed. The most giant tumor is considered inoperable, although there is hope it will react to treatment.
Then there's the good news: during a follow-up visit with her oncologist, the large, malignant, inoperable tumor shrank. It has shrunk so drastically that it is barely apparent. It had entirely vanished by the time the following follow-up occurred.
Then comes the bad news: Kate revisits her liver surgeon, hoping to discuss her scar and its healing. Instead, he gives her a scan of her liver. Even before the surgeon can explain what the ominous black mass on the image is, she already knows. Another tumor. A large one. Things don't look good.
Finally, when Kate has accepted the new, gloomy diagnosis, informed her family and friends, and begun to prepare for death, she receives an update on the tumor. It's not actually a tumor! The dark glob resulted from a signal dropout during the scan. Kate is tumor-free.
So that's it. She is cured or in remission, which is as good as it gets for someone with stage four colon cancer. Her family is overjoyed. Her friends are ecstatic. And she is. ..Well, that is complicated.
Of course, she is relieved to be well again. However, she feels pressured by her friends and family, as well as society at large, to project a positive image that she does not share. Why, she wonders, do people expect her to pretend she is still as good, if not better than she was before the diagnosis?
But she understands why. It's all part of the best-life philosophy.
The best-life notion offers the lie that you can maximize your existence to the point of avoiding pain and suffering. But how does this school of thought handle suffering when it inevitably occurs? Easy. They reframe it. Pain is a task to conquer, an opportunity to seize. You need to learn and grow from your misery to do things correctly.
People who hold this mindset frequently express gratitude for complex events in their lives. From celebrities describing ugly divorces on talk shows to scandal-plagued politicians, the refrain is almost always the same: "I'm grateful for the pain." It shaped me into who I am now.
Kate's agony has also shaped who she is today: traumatized and depleted as a result of several invasive procedures. A mother who hoped for a sibling for her son, but cancer treatment has rendered her infertile. A lady has lost touch with her younger, more courageous, more carefree self.
Regrets? Kate has quite a few. Society expects her to be an inspirational figure. After all, inspirations are far more straightforward than those who are still suffering and permanently altered by their agony.
Then again, Kate's pain has made her stronger. Despite societal expectations, she is brave enough to say that she has not conquered her anguish or made the most of her suffering. And she will not give in to the strain of becoming an inspiration.
7. Superficial concerns and why they are essential.
Kate's cancer diagnosis pushed her dangerously close to death, but she was miraculously saved at the last minute. Does this mean she sees life with new eyes, focused only on what is truly meaningful and authentic?
Yes . ..And no.
Yes, the beautiful moments she spends eating waffles with her son or trekking with friends in the North Carolina woodlands seem even sweeter. Yes, she understands that attempting to maximize her productivity or manage her life with carefully curated selections is ultimately pointless.
But she's also spending a lot of time thinking about one of the most "superficial" things anyone, especially a woman of a certain age, can be concerned about how she appears in the mirror.
Cancer has altered Kate's relationship with her physical form. Her entire body, from her clavicle to her tummy, is covered in scars, a physical reminder of her numerous surgeries. Every time she looks in the mirror, she remembers how severely her body failed her and nearly killed her.
Kate feels separated from her body. She used to feel like her body was her home. Nothing, not meditation, breathing, or affirmations, can now bring her body back to its former sensation of wholeness.
To make matters worse, she is of gender and age and society regards her body as a problem that must be fixed. Kate fought for years to be able to grow older, counting months, weeks, and days. Now, she's being targeted with products that make her appear younger than the age she worked so hard to get. Things that solidify, plump, and erase. She finds it irritating - but then again, it may be wonderful to gaze in the mirror and feel obliged to dab on some lipstick or softly apply wrinkle cream around her eyes. It would be lovely to care enough about her body to treat it this way.
Kate has known for a long time that things could be worse. The best-case situation is to survive, albeit disfigured.
But now she has the humility to recognize that things could be better: she could be scar-free, healthier, and younger-looking. She felt comfortable with herself. A buddy who suffers from chronic pain eventually reminds Kate that her body is more than simply a sack of meat. It's not superficial to want to feel good in your body.
Kate's body initially turned against her before rescuing her. It's marked. It is a miracle! - Aging. But she accepts it: this is the same physique that goes on treks and cooks pancakes for her children. And she's authorized to take care of it. Even if that means worrying about how you look in the mirror.
8. A collective lesson in COVID-related pain and suffering.
At the outset of her cancer treatment, Kate enrolls in a clinical experiment. She and others with her disease are given an experimental and untested course of immunotherapy. The trial may provide its participants a better chance of surviving but at a cost. They may be denied other treatments or face unnecessary dangers. Some participants will form a control group that does not get any therapy at all.
Nearly five years after she began participating in the trial, the results have been published. They are sent to Kate via mail. The envelope feels heavy in her hands before she opens it. How many of her fellow participants survived?
Not many. Some, like Kate, reacted to the new treatment. The majority have died.
Kate has repeatedly demonstrated during her treatment that there is no magic formula for avoiding suffering and mortality, no matter how much we would like to believe otherwise. But she has never seen it more plainly as she does now.
Kate recalls how the trial's formulaic structure provided her with comfort during her time there. There were schedules to stick to, instructions to follow, and medications to administer and consume. This formula provided her with a sense of control when she previously lacked it. She made no choices that explained her fortune.
Life is messy. Life is unpredictable. No matter how many lunchtime yoga classes we attend or how quickly we answer emails, life can be thrown off track by various catastrophes, including cancer, a bear attack, or, as it happens, a global pandemic.
Just as Kate's life appeared to be returning to normal, everything changed. COVID-19 has progressed from a disturbing news story to a full-fledged pandemic. Kate's life is again full of uncertainty and fear about the future. Only this time, she isn't alone.
Kate observes that people worldwide have their perfectly maintained and controlled lives upended by events beyond their control. She notices how, for many people, a long-simmering desire to live their best lives is finally coming to the surface. The prospect of approaching death, embodied in the form of an airborne virus, serves as a stark reminder that our time on Earth is limited. Is this why so many of us seek a formula, vowing to write novels, bake sourdough, and grow gardens while our lives are put on indefinite hold?
But Instagram stories about sourdough starters aren't much of a buffer against the pandemic's waves of tragedy: premature deaths, lives put on pause, businesses closed, and best-laid dreams dashed.
Perhaps, Kate believes, as the impulse to "make the most of" the pandemic fades and is replaced with sorrow and exhaustion, we are all coming to a common realization. We cannot avoid little misfortunes, personal tragedies, or global catastrophes. They are simply part of life. It may not be your "best life." However, it is the finest life we have.
Final Summary
We're bombarded with the idea that our ideal lifestyles are within grasp if we only try this productivity hack or go on that juice cleanse. Most of us understand that our lives aren't one Instagram-influencer-endorsed exercise or washaway from perfection. Still, we unconsciously believe that we have control over our lives. We cannot. At least not totally. It's time to quit trying for an unattainable ideal life and simply begin living.
Actionable advice: Give up thankfulness.
No, not like that. Gratitude is one of the most joyful and humbling emotions you can have, and you should not exclude it from your life. But why not abandon the modern approach to thankfulness, which requires you to write a list of everything you are grateful for in your life and keep it in a gratitude journal? Attempting to measure all the blessings you receive will not multiply them. And feeling compelled to write them down will likely reduce them. Our joys and blessings are multifaceted. Why not appreciate them in their full, complex, ephemeral brilliance rather than reducing them to a bullet point on a list?