Prompt 164. Your Anti-Bucket List

Kate Bowler on how there’s no cure for being human

Hi friend,

I’ve met a lot of my closest pals virtually. 

It started when I was sick, with the strangers who sent emails and DMs. With my dear friend Kate Bowler—professor of divinity at Duke University, bestselling author, and self-proclaimed incurable optimist—it was mutual friends putting us in touch via text. Kate and I happen to occupy the same small (arguably depressing) niche in the world of cancer, and our friends were right. We have so much in common, and she immediately felt like a friend. But honestly, Kate’s gift is that she makes everyone feel that way. 

Just a few days ago, Kate published a second memoir, No Cure for Being Human, which picks up where her bestselling Everything Happens For a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved) leaves off. In it, she grapples with how we make meaning of our finitude—of the fact that our days are numbered, yet we want more and more and more. It’s a gorgeous book, full of humor and powerful insights about what it means to live and to live well—and I’m excited to announce it’s our October Book Club pick! 

I’m also thrilled that she’ll be joining us at the end of the month for a Studio Visit, on October 31 from 1-2 pm. Talking to Kate is a dazzling experience—hearing her seamlessly integrate her scholarly brain with her comedic brain with an ability to talk about deeply personal, deeply hard things, all the while feeling as if she’s just sitting down at your kitchen table over coffee. She’s absolutely breathtaking, and I hope you’ll join us.

In the meantime, we’re sharing a short excerpt from Kate’s new book, No Cure for Being Human, and a prompt that asks us to recall the people, places, and things that make life worth living.

Sending love,

Suleika

Photo by Khaled Desouki/AFP via Getty Images

Prompt 164. Your Anti-Bucket List by Kate Bowler

Adapted excerpt from No Cure for Being Human

I wish someone had told me that the end of a life is a mathematical equation.

At 35, the doctors tell me I have Stage IV colon cancer and a slim chance of survival.

Suddenly years dwindle into months, months into days, and I begin to count them. All my dreams, ambitions, friendships, petty fights, vacations and bedtimes with a boy in dinosaur pajamas must be squeezed into a finite and dwindling number of hours, minutes, seconds.

My precarious diagnosis triggers a series of mental health assessments at the cancer clinic during which lovely and well-meaning counselors, all seemingly named Caitlin, are telling me to “find my meaning.” They wonder if I should consider making a “bucket list,” as many other patients have found the process to be clarifying.

I fish around for inspiration in old journals of mine, and one night, right before bed, I find a list dating back decades. I lay the journal flat on the comforter. It stretches across many pages in blue ink, pencil, then a red scrawl as new fantasies were caught and bottled like fireflies.

#5 See the pyramids.

#16 Take a scooter tour around Prince Edward Island.

#42 Publish a book.

#81 Make decent bread.

#86 Explore Venice with my parents.

“When I wrote this list, I wasn’t trying to imagine wrapping up my life. I suppose, I was just … dreaming,” I say to my husband Toban, trailing off.

“Oh, honey.” He wraps his arms around me. There is so much more silence between us now, as we walk closer to the edge, but I can hear my heart thrumming in my ears as I imagine crawling out of my own throat, out of this body, away, away, away.

It had not occurred to me, until now, that life’s wide road narrows to a dot on the horizon. 

The problem with aspirational lists, of course, is that they often skip the point entirely. Instead of helping us grapple with our finitude, they approximate infinity. They imply that with unlimited time and resources, we can do anything, be anyone. We can become more adventurous by jumping out of airplanes, more traveled by visiting every continent, or more cultured by reading the most famous books of all time. With the right list, we will never starve with the hunger of want.

“Make a list,” prods another Caitlin, so I try again and again and again. Lists of places to go. Dreams to interpret. Careers I might have enjoyed. Enormous statues I want to see. Languages I have learned and promptly forgotten. My line items are alternatively boring, plausible, unlikely and all of them seem to include an unmet Canadian need to drive a Zamboni.

What strange math. There is nothing like the tally of a life. All of our accomplishments, ridiculous. All of our striving, unnecessary. Our lives are unfinished and unfinishable. We do too much, never enough and are done before we’ve even started. We can only pause for a minute, clutching our to-do lists, at the precipice of another bounded day. The ache for more—the desire for life itself—is the hardest truth of all.

Your prompt for today:

Make an anti-aspirational bucket list. Fill it with the things you’ve done, the places you’ve gone, the people you’ve loved, the moments that made your life feel full. Record whatever it is that makes you ache for more.

If you’d like, you can post your response in the comments below, in our Facebook group, or on Instagram by tagging @theisolationjournals.

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Join us for Studio Visits

A monthly conversation series about the creative process, hosted by Suleika Jaouad. For our upcoming Studio Visit, Suleika will be hosting a virtual conversation with the New York Times bestselling author Kate Bowler on Sunday, October 31 from 1-2 pm ET.

Paid subscribers also get access to our video archive of past Studio Visits with amazing humans like Elizabeth Gilbert, Jon Batiste, & Nadia Bolz-Weber. We hope you’ll join us!