Kate Bowler - No Cure for Being Human: (And Other Truths I Need to Hear)

I am a professor of history, so I know this in my bones: nothing is inevitable. History is made by people who stared, blinking, into the uncertain future. Their paths were not lit before them by sacred meteors. For most of us, this sounds like good news. We choose and choose and choose again.

Before the baby, before the diagnosis, before the pandemic. Before. Before when I was earnest and clever and ignorant, I thought, life is a series of choices. I curated my own life until, one day, I couldnt. I had accepted the burden of limitless choices only to find that I had few to make. I was stuck in this body, this house, this life.

American culture has popular theories about how to build a perfect life. You can have it all if you just learn how to conquer your limits. There is infinity lurking somewhere at the bottom of your inbox or in the stack of self-help books on the bedside table. It taunts you as you grip the steering wheel in traffic, attempting your new breathing practice, or in the predawn minutes when you could be working out.

I have seen these guides to endless progress for sale in airport kiosks. Some are written by spiritual guides promising to reveal Gods single plan and purpose for my life. Trust God and the path will reveal itself. Other books call for wild action. There are oceans to plumb and mountains to climb and planes to exit midair. Carpe diem! Try The 4-Hour Workweek to escape the daily grind, or check out the latest research on eliminating distraction. There are bucket lists galore with glossy photographs of thrills and architectural wonders; calendars with rituals to eradicate inefficiencies; and writing journals juiced with visionary wisdom from gurus and titans of industry. These are the formulas for a meaningful life, how to live one and how to end one.

But the truth is somewhere inside of me: there is no formula. We live and we are loved and we are gone. Tumors budded and spread across my colon and liver without my consent, and here I am. I feel a spark of horror each time I remember it: we come undone.

This is what happens to all of us. We fall ill. We get old. We cant have that baby or keep that relationship. We missed our chance to go to this school or take that job. Our parents die before we know them, and our kids forget our love. We lose people before we can learn to live without them.

I want to believe Im independent, but I am caught in a web, and every choice I make pulls at its threads. Is this a good decision? Will this choice hold? Who else suffers if the web comes unraveled? I am not my own. At this moment, I can hear the stirring of my husband, Toban, his heavy footfall in the hallway followed by the soft hiss of the water pipes for his shower. My young son, Zach, is curled into a blanket like a puppy at my feet, his blond head catching the sideways light of the morning. The computer monitor is casting a poor reflection of this room, its stacks of dog-eared books and walls lined from floor to ceiling with my sisters framed watercolors: my husband and me as teenagers; my father hugging me at the worlds largest Noahs Ark; me, like a benevolent zookeeper, cradling Zach in his teddy-bear sleeper. I look around me and I think, these are the choices Ive made. The people Ive loved. No matter how fleeting this was, I need them to believe: everything mattered. This life was enough.

But its not true, of course.

Nothing will add up to enough. I wish someone had told me that the end of a life is a complex equation. Years dwindle into months, months into days, and you must begin to count them. All my dreams and ambitions, friendships and petty fights, vacations and bedtimes with a boy in dinosaur pajamas must be squeezed into hours, minutes, seconds.

How should I spend them?