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Happier with Gretchen Rubin
More Happier: Happier Podcast Book Club: Bestselling Author Kate Bowler [Revisited]
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- [00:02]
Elizabeth Craft
Lemonada.
- [00:12]
Gretchen Rubin
Hello, we're here for more Happier a podcast where we get more of the happier podcast. Today we're revisiting one of our Happier Podcast book club episodes. This one is with bestselling author and my friend Kate Bowler. I mean, this conversation has really stuck with both of us.
- [00:32]
Elizabeth Craft
Yeah. I mean, Kate has such a unique ability to speak about difficult subjects, but with such honesty and such humor. I feel when she talks like, I feel like my heart opening up. I mean, she really is unique that way.
- [00:49]
Gretchen Rubin
Yeah. If you're looking for a memoir to keep up with your hashtag, read 2525. Her book no Cure for Being Human and Other Truths I Need to Hear is a captivating reading. No, we're revisiting this episode from 2021. And now for the conversation about the book. Two years ago, we launched our happier Podcast book club and today we will talk about our most recent choice, the wonderful memoir by Kate Bowler called no Cure for Being Human.
- [01:24]
Elizabeth Craft
Yes, here is the official description. It's hard to give up on the feeling that the life you really want is just out of reach. A beachbody by summer, a trip to Disneyland around the corner, a promotion on the horizon. Everyone wants to believe that they are headed toward good, better, best. But what happens when the life you hope for is put on hold indefinitely? Kate Bowler believed that life was a series of unlimited choices until she discovered at the age of 35 that that her body was wracked with cancer. In no Cure for Being Human, she searches for a way forward as she mines the wisdom and absurdity of today's the Best Life now advice industry, which insists on exhausting positivity and on trying to convince us that we can out, eat out, learn and outperform our humanness. We are, she finds, as fragile as the day we were born. With dry wit and unflinching honesty, Kay Bowler grapples with her diagnosis, her ambition, and her faith as she tries to come to terms with her limitations. In a culture that says anything is possible, she finds that we need one another if we're going to tell the truth. Life is beautiful and terrible, full of hope and despair and everything in between. And there's no cure for being human.
- [02:41]
Gretchen Rubin
Elizabeth and I both also loved Kate's first memoir called Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've loved. Kate is a professor at Duke Divinity School, and I have also read her academic books, A History of the American Prosperity Gospel and the Preacher's the Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities.
- [03:01]
Elizabeth Craft
And she has a great podcast Everything Happens. And if you'd like to listen to an interview of Gretchen and Kate talking on Everything Happens, there will be a link in the show notes.
- [03:13]
Gretchen Rubin
Hello, Kate.
- [03:14]
Elizabeth Craft
Hi, Kate.
- [03:15]
Kate Bowler
Hello. Thanks so much for having me.
- [03:18]
Gretchen Rubin
Oh, it's so great to be talking to you, Kate. We loved this memoir.
- [03:22]
Kate Bowler
Oh, thanks. That means so much to me. Anyone who wants to walk into my just gentle despair, I feel so fortunate to have friends like that.
- [03:33]
Gretchen Rubin
Well, here's a question. I mean, you're clearly in this extremely challenging situation and now you've written two memoirs about it. And it's interesting because research shows that writing a narrative of something often does help people make sense of it and helps them come to peace with it. How do you feel like the process of writing about your experiences has helped you understand them or think about them?
- [04:01]
Kate Bowler
Yeah, I certainly think that it was both therapeutic emotionally, but also intellectually really satisfying because it just lined up so beautifully with the kinds of things I researched.
- [04:15]
Gretchen Rubin
So I uncannily say, one might say.
- [04:19]
Kate Bowler
It is eerie and horrifying and wonderful to then have a chance to be able to research the kind of different cultures, cultural formulas we have for how we explain suffering and what happens to us. And so for the first book, I was really interested in the. In the problem of the crisis, like what happens when your life comes apart and there's a before and after and you're kind of wondering why and how do I deal with the unfairness of life. And then this. I got to have a different version of the same problem, which is, well, then what kind of. When life is a chronic condition, what kind of formulas and advice giving do we get in that stage when you have to move forward with this life, you didn't choose. So in both kind of bookends of this experience, it really has helped me make sense of life as a crisis and then life as a chronic condition.
- [05:12]
Elizabeth Craft
And did you feel like your sort of attitude or your place in this experience was different when you started the second one from where you were in the first one?
- [05:24]
Kate Bowler
I think I write either when something's unbelievably funny or unbelievably sad. It's usually a starting point for me. And I think part of what was a similar sort of emotional place for me was that I was extremely lonely in having a life that was unsolvable. Felt like I'd kind of always been exiled from the land of the normal and the small talkers. Like I was always gonna be the person that was bad at kids birthday parties. And so it did give Me a chance to think about why it's so hard to make sense of problems that persist. And that mental framework, I think was one I needed to kind of sit in for a bit.
- [06:07]
Gretchen Rubin
Well, I thought one of the most interesting observations that you made because it seemed surprising, but then the minute you pointed it out, it rang absolutely true, was that the people who love you most are the ones who wanna ignore the issue. The. Because they want to just be like, oh, well, this is. Okay. Well, we're, you know, because they don't want to have to accept the reality. So explain that because that to me was like a big, big insight.
- [06:33]
Kate Bowler
Well, I guess I thought that like the people who are around you in a crisis, that they're kind of like the firefighter type friends. Like they rush in, they bring the water and they want to put it out. But then what happens if your life is sort of a low grade burn? And I found that over the course because my, you know, I was initially diagnosed with stage four cancer. But it wasn't just an event. It was really intense, persistent treatment and then very complicated, intense, sometimes life threatening surgeries for about two years. And then it still wasn't over. It was just. And then it shifted to scary scans and a lot of travel to try to find experts. And the long haul meant that it was really. It wasn't just gonna have a moment where it interrupted my relationships, it was gonna redefine all of my relationships. And I just hated that because I wanted to be lovable. And not just lovable, but likable. Like, who wants to be the one that just keeps having the problem? And I realized for a long time I thought, well, am I just not doing this right? Like, am I having, like, why can't I get back to being this easy person? And then I realized sometimes it's, it really is the people who love you most that find the intractable nature of your problems, the fact that you can't be solved to be unbearable because they love you. And so then you both end up lying to each other. I'm always saying things are getting better and they're always pretending it never happened. And somewhere in the middle there is the fact that we're not just sort of interrupted that so often we're, we're changed in the process of going through something like that. And we all need to make a different kind of peace with it.
- [08:22]
Gretchen Rubin
They want to put it in the rearview mirror and be like, well, that was intense, but now we're moving forward. And you're like, it's not in the rear view mirror. It's still in my windshield. And it is, but that's too painful.
- [08:33]
Kate Bowler
Yeah. I mean, it was this morning. Like, I just. I just came from blood work, and, I mean, I barely know how to talk about it as. As a part of my life, because I want so much to be reassuring and be. But I think partly that's why there's just. No, there's just not a neatness to the way that we love each other. And we're often in. I think David Sedaris was the one that said it, like, he was so great about. It was about his sister, and he said that we. We play roles long after they outlive their usefulness. And so I still want to be sort of grateful, patient, grateful daughter. And mostly, I'm just sort of person with a lot of problems.
- [09:22]
Elizabeth Craft
Well. And, Kate, how does Tobin feel about your husband feel about the memoirs? Does he read them? Because they really are, you know, a look inside of you.
- [09:32]
Gretchen Rubin
Yeah. Yeah.
- [09:34]
Kate Bowler
He's been so funny. My poor family. I think in a play I saw recently, it was like, no one's safe around a writer. And so I'm sure there's. I'm sure it's always very awkward, but I write a lot about him, and I write a lot about my parents, and they've been really generous with the absurdity of all of our lives, and they've allowed me. I think there's just a funny way that sometimes we can be much more honest in our writing than we are out loud. And in a way, it's almost like they allow us to be having two conversations at once. Like, I write down the almost unbearable truths, and then out loud, we can just hug each other.
- [10:18]
Gretchen Rubin
Like, my husband doesn't read anything that I write.
- [10:21]
Elizabeth Craft
Are you serious?
- [10:21]
Gretchen Rubin
Yeah, he just says he gives him the heebie jeebies. And, like. And it's not even like I'm writing anything. Nothing like at the level of you. But it's so nice. But, yeah, it's just like. Because I think it's exactly that there's some kind of barrier that is crossed. So that's interesting that you can have two kinds of conversations at one time, and maybe it does make you feel like you can communicate certain things that you couldn't say to them.
- [10:45]
Kate Bowler
There was one part of the story that I didn't really think at all that was a part of the story which was just the question of vocation. So I'm the child of academics. I've got two professor parents, and they. They have very sort of expensive jobs, jobs that, you know what I mean? Like, it takes forever to get them and it's so hard to keep them. And, you know, it can be a career that has a lot of disappointment and loneliness. And so when I got this really fancy job at Duke University, I didn't realize how much of my parents hopes that I had quietly decided to shoulder as part of like a look. All of your best hopes, all of your best hopes can rest in me. Don't worry. And so when I was dying, my father particularly. Oh my goodness.
- [11:34]
Gretchen Rubin
Right about his, his challenges and his disappointments.
- [11:38]
Kate Bowler
Yeah. So when, when I got this job and then when I almost lost it, you know, by suddenly getting sick and not being able to work again, I was then trying to decide, like, are these, if I were to continue to try to do this work, is how much of these dreams are my own and how much are they really? Just trying to carry the weight of this story that I care about, which was, don't worry, all your sacrifices were worth it. So that was. I didn't really think I would write about that, but there I was.
- [12:08]
Gretchen Rubin
Right.
- [12:09]
Elizabeth Craft
And then you ultimately decided it was for you and you did want to do it.
- [12:13]
Kate Bowler
I think that work is such a strange thing when we're trying to decide what our careers and what our callings. And it ended up being a tremendous, giving me a tremendous amount of dignity, but also agency to not just be in a cancer center getting infusions all the time, but being able to work on something that let me feel like I wasn't eclipsed by all these things I didn't choose.
- [12:37]
Gretchen Rubin
Well, Kate, we have a listener question that is right on this subject. So let's take a break and then when we come back, we'll read the listener question and talk more about this idea of a career and a calling.
- [12:58]
Elizabeth Craft
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- [13:30]
Gretchen Rubin
And Marley Spoon just launched their new 15 Minute Express recipes. They put three of those on the menu each week. And they have some great 20 minute options too. This new year, fast track your way to eating well with Marley spoon. Head to marleyspoon.com offer happier and use code happier for up to 27 free meals. That's right. Up to 27 free meals with Marley Spoon one last time. That's Marley spoon.com offer happier for up to 27 free meals and make sure you use our promo code Happier so they know we sent you.
- [14:07]
Elizabeth Craft
You know how sometimes a meal leaves you energized and other times sluggish, foggy or even hungrier? That may be your glucose talking. Foods that are sugar and carb heavy and you know my experience here cause your body's glucose levels to spike, often followed by a crash. This matters because it turns out 88% of us have suboptimal metabolic health, so glucose could be the next big thing to track when it comes to health. That's why we're excited about Lingo, a new biowearable from Abbott that tracks your glucose in real time.
- [14:41]
Gretchen Rubin
I've been wearing Lingo for weeks now and I've learned that for my body, if I move around after I eat a meal, my spike is much more gradual, much lower. And so I've learned that I just need to get up and move around after I eat. What works for me might work very differently for you, but that's what works for my body. To see how your body responds to food and learn what you can do to improve your metabolism, try Lingo. It starts at $49 for a two week plan, no prescription needed for a limited time. Save 10% on your first order with happier@hello lingo.com the Lingo Glucose System is.
- [15:16]
Elizabeth Craft
For users 18 years and older, not on insulin. It is not intended for diagnosis of diseases, including diabetes. For more information please visit hello lingo.com us okay, we are back and we have a listener question from Diana. She says, I was particularly moved by the scene at the bar during a conference where Kate is talking to a friend about writing her next book in the face of her diagnosis. It's a question I've thought about as I get older, the place of work. Given our limited time on the planet, I'd love if Kate could talk about this more. I had a rare kind of cancer 16 years ago when I was about Kate's age and had young sons, which has made her work especially moving to me and Kate.
- [15:59]
Gretchen Rubin
I think she's referring to the moment where you say to a friend, how will I know when this work has cost me too much? And he said, it likely depends on whether this is a career or a calling. And that seemed like a very clear distinction in Your mind?
- [16:15]
Kate Bowler
Yeah, I sort of had the reverse version of the lottery question. What would you do if you won a million dollars? Like, would you quit your job? Would you finally pick a fox with your boss? Like, what would you do? And instead I had a what would you do if you're gonna probably die at the end of this year? Would you go on to try to write a hilariously specific historical book that probably about 3 to 500 people are gonna read?
- [16:40]
Gretchen Rubin
Wait, by the way, I. I love that book. It was a book for everyone.
- [16:45]
Kate Bowler
Bless you. Bless you. I know. Well, it's always good to have friends.
- [16:49]
Gretchen Rubin
That's how I know I actually would have read it anyway. I am like, you write about subjects that are very interesting to me, but it's true. They're not going to be on every coffee table across the country. Yeah, they're specific.
- [17:01]
Kate Bowler
They're learning for a thing. And nothing but the thing, it turns out, is the thing I love to do. And the way I feel my very soul, specific, bizarre, unique giftedness in the world, which is I am great at sitting on my butt for a very long time in an archive and pulling out a story that is about religious history in America. And so I guess the question was, it felt wonderfully in the end, anti utilitarian. Like, what if it's for no reason at all except that it's good? Like, it's inherently good. And because I think we are made in the making of it now, there.
- [17:44]
Gretchen Rubin
Was something very beautifully affirming about you're like, here are my microfiche requests. Bring it on.
- [17:52]
Kate Bowler
I will want all of these scanned.
- [17:56]
Gretchen Rubin
The librarian was like, oh, my gosh, what just happened?
- [18:00]
Kate Bowler
Ma'am, do you really need all of that microfiche? Exactly right? Yeah. I love terrorizing just really kindly library workers to be like, I'm gonna need all 40 years of that magazine, please. It feels because my friend Doug said it so beautifully when I was basically just struggling, well, what is this for? Because shouldn't I just stay home and be a loving presence in my house 24 hours a day? And he said, kate, the way you're framing this, it just isn't quite right that it's either about your interests or your ambitions, but that even if the worst happens, that your son, like, in referring to the book, he was like, he can find you there. That struck me as such a beautiful, loving way of telling whether our work is good is if it says if it becomes a part of who we are and what we give. And that really rang a bell for me. And I thought, what a good way of making something beautiful for no reason except that.
- [19:07]
Gretchen Rubin
Well, one thing. I mean, comparing this memoir to your last memoir, it did strike me as. This one was sharper. It felt like you were going more into not maybe brushing off the sharp edges as much as maybe you had done. I don't even know, consciously, unconsciously, in the writing of it. It felt like this time you were more. There was an edge to it. Did you feel that way in writing, or is that just your experience of it?
- [19:34]
Kate Bowler
Yeah. I wonder sometimes if we just have truths that we can live with, so we tell ourselves stories, and we can live in stories that make a kind of peace or meaning with the people, with ourselves and the people around us. And so when I wrote the first Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've loved, I wrote it in really only about a month, assuming that I was going to die pretty quickly. So I was writing what I hoped would be part kind of, wow, it's so hard to. To live with unexplainable suffering while everyone's trying to explain you. And it was also meant to be a love letter to my family because I assumed that that was what we could all need to. To go on into a really hard future without me. And so there were a lot of things I didn't say, especially about how really complicated and painful my medical experience has been as being part of a clinical trial where it turns out that a lot of the drugs I was on and the treatment I was given was because it was good for the experiment, but not necessarily good for me. And I was so worried about just trying to audition for good medical care and that I really didn't even feel able to be honest about how awful it had been. So when it came time to this one, I was like, you know what? Let's just try to tell the truth about that. Problems that can't be solved place tremendous burdens on us. And so, yeah, I did feel like I definitely came out swinging on this one.
- [21:12]
Elizabeth Craft
Well, Kate, on that subject, Jamie said, I was really shocked by some of the doctor's actions when the doctor didn't tell Kate she could have been treated at home, and even more with the failure to read the lab that she and a friend had to figure out themselves. Did she confront him? And we were, of course, also very struck. I mean, it's just what you were talking about. Did you confront that doctor ever?
- [21:36]
Kate Bowler
I did confront him, and it has been. I guess that's been one of the most painful parts of all of this is that, I mean, the longer I lived, the more I felt able to be really direct about how hard it's been. And I still found that the response was the same, which was, I'm sorry you feel that way, or. But aren't you so lucky to have gotten this drug at all? I get. Aren't you so lucky the most often?
- [22:05]
Gretchen Rubin
Well, it's like the plastic surgeon that was like, you know, given everything you've been through, I would think you'd just be glad to be alive. And you're like, for real? A plastic surgeon is lecturing me about this?
- [22:16]
Kate Bowler
I couldn't.
- [22:17]
Elizabeth Craft
We were incensed by that.
- [22:18]
Gretchen Rubin
Beyond.
- [22:19]
Kate Bowler
I'm, like, most basically naked in front of someone who's, like, poking at me, telling me that because I'm not horrifically maimed, that I should probably just be fine with it.
- [22:30]
Gretchen Rubin
You do make it funny in the moment, and I think that's part of your gift, Kate, is to kind of capture the funniness of it. Because it really is so heart wrenching. And we do feel incensed for you.
- [22:42]
Kate Bowler
Thank you. That means. Honestly, that means so much to me because I. Because no one. No one is there in that room to remind you, like, oh, you are. I'm so sorry. I am so sorry this happened to you. You don't deserve that. I. What an awful thing. Like, all those things are things you have to tell yourself much later after you wonder, wait, could I have done something different? Did I? But the feeling of. I think that's been. The struggle is when you have to let go of so much so quickly. Like, I had to let go of control over, like, you just wake up and you've got bandages and you don't know what's underneath or how it's gonna look. You have to give up on vanity. You have to give up on anything but your survival. And somewhere along the line, I realized how much of my own feeling of worth I had given up. Because I really did feel, when I had had to beg for medical care for so long, which is why I had stage four cancer in the first place, is that I'd been turned away at the ER with Pepto Bismol for months, that somewhere along the line, I began to feel really not worth saving. And it has been really hard to get that back. And so I think part for me of the healing power of being able to write all this down is I can see from the outside that a long time ago, I wish I'd had somebody who was gonna fight harder for my life.
- [24:15]
Elizabeth Craft
Well, Just from an outsider's point of view, anytime you speak or I read your books, I find you to be so extraordinary and, like, so wise. Not to say, oh, you're wise because you had cancer, but you've done all this studying, and you're such an amazing speaker, and you have the way of putting things. So for you to feel that way, if you could feel that way, anyone can feel that way, right?
- [24:39]
Kate Bowler
Oh, man, it does. Sometimes that feels like the worst part of all of it is that even if I can be, like, a densely networked person, even if I can be a direct and decent advocate, that if it's this hard for me, it must be almost impossible for everybody if they're like me and they're kind of off the beaten path of medical treatment. Gretchen, you said the funniest thing. Didn't you say I was on the service road or something? I was like, I'm on the medical. I don't want. I want to be on the medical superhighway. You're like, yeah, I think you're kind of on this side service road. And that made me laugh really hard.
- [25:18]
Gretchen Rubin
Wait, but speaking of. So what happened? I mean, this is just, like, pure, like, what happened in Kate's life. So, like, just tell us what happened with the doctor.
- [25:27]
Kate Bowler
Well, when I confronted him, yeah, there's a lot of blinking and discomfort and. And then that he didn't know, even though he of course knew, because I knew the other. When I. The surgeon in the room had gone to tell him directly, and then he obviously felt very uncomfortable with continuing to provide me with care, and so I switched oncologists. But the. And this I truly find unbelievably hilarious. But. So I just wanted to give him a graceful out. And the last thing he said, though, he was so happy to not be my doctor anymore, I could just tell how absolutely happy he was. And then he stands up to leave, and he walks out the door, and then he. He turns right before he closes it, and he goes, thanks for not writing about me in the New York Times. Oh, and all I thought was, oh, bud, there's a sequel.
- [26:22]
Elizabeth Craft
Yes. You just wait.
- [26:24]
Kate Bowler
Whoa.
- [26:26]
Elizabeth Craft
Oh, my God.
- [26:27]
Gretchen Rubin
I mean, the levels. I mean, there's so many things wrong with that. My mind is, like, exploding.
- [26:33]
Kate Bowler
Wow, Gretchen, sometimes I want you to be a lawyer again. So that's.
- [26:40]
Gretchen Rubin
Wow.
- [26:42]
Kate Bowler
See? You'd be great at this. It does. Sometimes, I think the stories that we're given about how to live, one of them is that we just have to figure out how to be A great patient. And that has been one of the formulas that broke down for me finally. I mean, it just exploded, was that there's no such thing as convincing people that your life is worth saving or that people either will step up for you or they won't, and you just have to find those people. But certainly the role of grateful patient didn't do me nearly the amount of work as I hoped it would.
- [27:14]
Gretchen Rubin
Well, Kate, on that topic, I read. So Gilda Radner and Gene Wilder were married, and Gilda Radner died of ovarian cancer. And both of them had written memoirs. And I read both of their memoirs, which was super fascinating to see both of their perspectives on their time together. But one of the things that Gene Wilder said struck me so much was he said that, first of all, he thought that they didn't get as good a care because all the doctors were just so starstruck by the fact that they were these recognizable people. But then he said that Gilda Radner had felt so much pressure to be a good patient and to be funny and to be entertaining. He thought that she was just drained and exhausted by it. Not like that that, like, changed anything, but just that he felt like she felt so much pressure to earn attention. And so that very much was, you know, the kind of thing that you were saying that you were feeling as well.
- [28:03]
Kate Bowler
Yeah, it's like a particular medical form of the toxic positivity that we absorb. I mean, I think this is what is so confusing about the role of patient, is that most of our job will simply to be someone who endures, someone who just takes the medication, lives through the side effects, comes back again for the next treatment. But we're given these really intense victory narratives that you're gonna kick cancer's butt or you're gonna be a certain kind of person. And certainly, I think it feels emotionally confusing because it is that everyone has to be playing two roles, that they are both cheerful and typically enduring the hardest moments of their life in the same breath.
- [28:46]
Gretchen Rubin
And that's why you see with, like, a really gifted doctor or nurse, like, you feel like they are on your side or that if. Even if they can't, they would. That you feel their desire to heal just. Just as you feel for yourself or for someone else. Like, they feel like they're on that side.
- [29:02]
Kate Bowler
Yeah. Yeah, that's right.
- [29:05]
Elizabeth Craft
Coming up, Kate will read one of our favorite passages from her book. But first, this break, Foreign.
- [29:19]
Gretchen Rubin
Elizabeth. This year, our annual challenge is to read 25 and 25. Read for 25 minutes. Every day in 2025 and that includes listening. You can expand your reading by listening on Audible and you can Explore more than 1 million audiobooks, podcasts, and exclusive Audible Originals all in one easy app.
- [29:39]
Elizabeth Craft
Gretch I am all about Audible. I listen to books all day, every day. Right now I'm listening to Colored Television by Danzi Senna and I am obsessed with it. I cannot get enough audiobooks. If I have to have a choice between reading with my eyes and reading with my ears, I'm always choosing reading with my ears. Plus, on Audible you can find insight and expert advice on health, relationships, career, finance, finance. So much more. Start listening today. Sign up for a free 30 day trial at audible.com happier this message is.
- [30:22]
D
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- [31:57]
Gretchen Rubin
And now, Kate, read that passage. Elizabeth and I both loved this passage so much.
- [32:02]
Kate Bowler
Aw, sure. All right. Someday we won't need to hope. Someday we don't need courage. Time itself will be wrapped up with a bow and God will draw us into the eternal moment where there will be no suffering, no disease, no email. In the meantime, we are stuck with our beautiful terrible finitude, our gossip and petty fights, self hatred and refusal to check our voicemail. We get divorced, waste our time, and break our own hearts. We are cobbled together by the softest material, laughter and pets and long talks with old friends, by God's unscrupulous love and by communities who give us a place to belong. And there is nothing particularly glamorous about us except that we have moments where we are shockingly magnanimous before forgetting about it the next day. How lucky then, that we are not failing. Our lives are not problems to be solved. We can have meaning and beauty and love, but nothing even close to resolution.
- [33:13]
Gretchen Rubin
That last line seems to sum up a lot of the book, which is, there can. There's so much search and there's so much beauty and meaning, but there's no resolution. And you are trying to make your peace with that.
- [33:28]
Kate Bowler
Yeah. Yeah. Because you know how much I love a good checklist. Like, I just love it so much. Like, if I could figure out what enoughness or doneness in a life felt like, then I would. And I feel it every time I have a scary scan coming up or I have a birthday and I'm trying to figure out, like, what do I need to get to to wrap this up? And it just reminds me of something my old man friend said when I first got sick was I was like, just tell me, what age do I have to get to? I just have to get my son launched. What do I need to do? And he was like, oh, but Kate, it comes undone. And that's such a perfect way of reminding us again and again, we don't really. There will be ends, but nothing close to finishing life. And that maybe it would be good to have a little bit more tolerance for the uncertainty, that uncertain feeling that that gives us.
- [34:30]
Elizabeth Craft
Well, one of my takeaways from the book is that we don't have to feel bad about not feeling transcendent. Like we can just live. And that's sort of fine. Just like how your bucket list has seeing the biggest ball of yarn, you know, it's not that grand of a Desire.
- [34:52]
Kate Bowler
Well, it's a huge ball of yarn, Elizabeth. I feel like you're not really. I feel like you're diminishing the sheer size of this, essentially. So, yeah, I think. Cause at first I wanted so much to like, make every minute into a moment.
- [35:05]
Gretchen Rubin
Yes.
- [35:06]
Kate Bowler
And like, the existential weight of that. Gee whiz, like, it was so intense. And yeah, I think we. I think we should feel permission to live our ordinary, dumb, beautiful lives as they are.
- [35:18]
Gretchen Rubin
Well. And then along those lines, we have our final question from a listener. Rebecca writes, in your book, you describe three experiences of time. Tragic, apocalyptic, and pastoral. Do you think we should live our lives differently in pastoral time if we know that tragic or apocalyptic time could happen to us someday? Would you have lived your before life differently, knowing what was coming after? So, just for people who don't remember what those three terms are, remind them of what those three kinds of time are.
- [35:51]
Kate Bowler
Sure. This comes from my friend Luke, who is saying that there's ordinary time, which is just think of, like, farmers. It's sowing and reaping and getting up and fixing the fence, and it's just all the ordinary stuff. And that we so often live where a Tuesday is a Tuesday and summer break is coming up. And then there's a tragic time when you wake up and you can't believe that the world is still. Is still having their day. Because your life, in the way you knew it ended. And it feels surreal. And maybe for me, it always felt sort of bright and crisp and awful. And that's the kind of time where you could. Where you understand the world's fragility in a way that you didn't before. And then there's like, apocalyptic time, which is how we feel when we think about the end of things. Like the end of the world, the end of. So, like, the way we feel about the environment, environmental brinksmanship and the explosion. The explosion of our planet. We feel that way when we think about when we want to make huge changes and we imagine binaries, that there's good and evil. And so in each kind of time, it gives us a different clarity, the ability to make. To either live with the world that we have or to totally unmake it. I was in New York recently and yelled at by one of those guys wearing a sandwich board that said, the end is near. And I smiled at him because I was like, oh, bud, that's hard. That's hard work. And he yelled at me for two blocks. He was like, I see your fake smile. And I was like, Right, right, right. Apocalyptic time. Like, there's no such thing as little smiles in apocalyptic time. Also, that man didn't seem very nice. But I lived in a version of Ordinary Time. But I think I would have, if I'd known, I would have done it differently. I wouldn't have always lived in kind of this aggressive futurism. Cause I was never really fully in the present. I was always like making plans and trying to figure out if we should paint the baby room and what's our next trip with our, you know, my parents and I was very checklisty and like a bulldozer moving toward the future. And if I'd known, I would have accepted the present for the gift that it is. Knowing that everybody is going to cycle into tragic time, but that just like, like live in the season that I have while I have it. Accept the beauty of that window.
- [38:22]
Elizabeth Craft
That's a great insight.
- [38:24]
Kate Bowler
Yeah.
- [38:24]
Gretchen Rubin
And that idea comes through so strongly in your books, both of your books. You know, it's really powerful. I think it's part of what makes the book so powerful. So, Kate, we have to let you get back to everything you were doing. But first your tendency. I know you know your tendency.
- [38:41]
Kate Bowler
Yes, yes. I am an obliger. I just want everyone to be happy, but especially you guys right now. If there's anything you need from me, I'll be right here.
- [38:49]
Gretchen Rubin
Great. I love obligeration. And how about a try this at home? Do you have a suggestion? What has worked for you?
- [38:55]
Kate Bowler
Yeah, I guess I was thinking about the kind of friend or kind of person that I now realize how much I need now that I'm in this stage in my life, which is the chronic stage, where I just, you know, I have relatively unsolvable problems like chronic cancer. And that we might need a different kind of friend. And that I maybe need to be a different kind of friend. So one thing I've started doing is especially when our friends have problems and we are very likely to forget them if they're not a crisis. So if somebody has something coming up, like maybe an anniversary of a divorce or a medical appointment that they're nervous about, I'll ask them when it is. And I'll just try to put it in my calendar so that even like a week before, a week after that, just say, ask so and so about this. So then you're the friend that doesn't forget, which to me is always a.
- [39:49]
Gretchen Rubin
Gift, like a checking in reminder. Because I think you're right. We almost have an instinct to want to forget about it because we don't want to think about their pain or. Right. Yeah. Oh, that's a great idea. A checking in reminder.
- [40:03]
Elizabeth Craft
Love that.
- [40:04]
Gretchen Rubin
Well, Kate, thank you so much. It's always such a treat to get to talk to you and we loved reading your memoir, you guys.
- [40:12]
Kate Bowler
I felt so special. Thank you. Thanks so much for picking the book. It really meant a lot to me. Thank you.
- [40:16]
Gretchen Rubin
Well, people loved it, so thanks so much.
- [40:18]
Elizabeth Craft
Thanks, Kate.
- [40:19]
Kate Bowler
Thanks, friends.
- [40:20]
Gretchen Rubin
If you'd like to hear more from Kate, as one does, you can listen to her podcast Everything Happens or you can listen to an interview that Elizabeth and I did with her in episode 273. And speaking of books, Elizabeth, what are we reading?
- [40:33]
Elizabeth Craft
I am listening to under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer.
- [40:39]
Gretchen Rubin
And I'm reading Zen Inklings by Donald Richie. Well, we hope you're feeling happier after this episode. We had so much fun revisiting this thought provoking conversation with Kate Bowler.
- [40:59]
Elizabeth Craft
I always try to keep her try this at home in mind. Be the friend who doesn't forget. You know, as LA navigates the aftermath of these awful fires, this feels like a prudent moment to keep tabs on friends. Gretch.
- [41:14]
Gretchen Rubin
Absolutely. Remember, the best time to start a happiness project is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
- [41:31]
Elizabeth Craft
Gretch. It's always amazing to me how Kate just drops so many, like, perfectly phrased things that, you know, I could spend a whole career trying to come up with.
- [41:42]
Gretchen Rubin
No, she's so wise. From the onward project.