On Being, which airs on Sunday mornings at 7 am in Vermont, has been my listening companion while I do a “better” clean of my kitchen-e.g. clean the stove versus a quick once over, wash the floor etc.
This past Sunday, Kate Bowler and Wajahati Ali were the guests. Both have dealt with stage 4 cancer-Ali as the father of a young child and Bowler who was diagnosed at the age of 35 with colon cancer. Ali is a columnist at “The Daily Beast and author of “Go Back to Where you Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American.” Bowler is the author of “Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved) and hosts the podcase “Everything Happens.”
While I encourage you to either listen or read the transcript, I thought I’d post some of the take home points of what’s it’s like living on the edge when your seriously acute illness turns chronic, to say nothing of the fact that they’ve been dealing with the extra layer of Covid.
Ali: Like you’re living on the knife’s edge of uncertainty and hope, life and doom, at all times.
Bowler: I think maybe the big transition in my life, in terms of trying to figure out how to be a hopeful person, has been the move from a crisis condition to a chronic condition…
there’s that feeling that everybody has to buck up and rise to the occasion, and there’s a certain energy around that. And I think one of the big transitions for me was to figure out that I couldn’t live on that energy forever. After a bit, you’re kind of the one who’s had the crises. I had the dramatic life-or-death problem… And then I realized, oh, you have to learn to live here, the way this is, much closer to the edge, where it doesn’t really feel exactly like a knife’s edge anymore. It feels sort of like you’re asked to build a tiny home on the side of a cliff. You’re just really — you know, a natural disaster might come by, but you’re really checking the weather a lot.
So how does one live where any minute the occasional tumbling block or two becomes a landslide? What happens when your crisis is chronic?
Bowler: Life is not a series of choices. And I think the pandemic made that clearer than ever before, to everyone at the same time, that choice was always an illusion and a luxury.
Ali: I felt like, as a father, the only responsible act for me was to prepare and not go for these cliché, stupid slogans that avoid pain and death.
Bowler: I’ve never felt that just because a future might be good that it would make the present bearable. I’ve never thought that, because it’s still now.
Ali: You can’t escape pain. You can’t escape death….so, with whatever days I have left, am I willing then to take that risk and make those changes, or am I able and privileged to make those changes, to live out the rest of my life, whenever and however death comes, to live a life of meaning and purpose? Because otherwise, the other pivot then can — you can be a nihilist. It could lead to such dread and pain and depression and cynicism: I have wasted everything — it’s gone.
Bowler: I just think that the solution is not then to pivot to this very facile “be present,” in which that’s the solution to the past and the future. I think the solution to the past and the future is that there is none. It’s that we borrow from each of them for really — to make really meaningful choices; is that we pull from the past in order to inform a richer future. We pull from the future to be like, Well, it reminds me that these things are yet undone. But if we prevent ourselves from moving between past, present, and future, I think we become really narrow in our cultural language for how to live.
Ali: I think there’s something about the spiritual traditions and philosophical traditions that are rooted in this understanding of how we are just sands in time, and things are connected, and this too shall pass, and we shall pass with it. But you still have to find meaning in this, whatever “this” is, this absurd life.
Bowler: I think about being an incurable optimist as being a really, fundamentally, a story about hope… it was always about all of us; that we belong to each other in a way that makes hope not really just about whether I get a cure and my life works out. It’s about whether you feel yourself as part of this wild project about love…And I think always being able to be honest about the utter brokenness we see reflected in our bodies and in our cultures, and yet also, like flowers through concrete, the way that, even in the cancer center, you see that son reach over and tuck a strand of hair behind his mom’s ear. And you go into what you think is going to be the worst few years of your life, and you end up with a nurse named Meg, who goes on vacation with you. And you learn how to live with the things that you can’t change. I find that the brokenness is always an indictment of all of us, and also just the promise that this isn’t it. And the whole idea that there are formulas for how to live and how to die perfectly is a really wonderful lie.
Ali: There is no cure for being a human. We all need something to keep fighting for, and so for me, it’s like, if I give up hope — and there’s so much that will inspire you to give up hope: climate change, racism, violent insurrection, the end of democracy, income inequality — I’ll just keep going for the next hour …And if I was in any way a source of healing and at least a smile, then I feel like the day was worthwhile. I did my small part in this thing called life.
Bowler: I read a lovely article the other day about how we can be characterized not just by our finitude, like the things that are numbered, but our natality — the idea that we have such unbelievable potential to begin again. And I feel that so often, when I see how hard people try — especially during the pandemic, how hard they tried to survive and care for one another and move forward. So yeah, I think natality is — it’s a complete miracle, and it makes tomorrow feel really beautiful.
Kate Bowler’s
TED Talk, “Everything Happens for a Reason” Lies I’ve Loved
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