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About the\xa0book

It\u2019s hard to give up on the feeling that the life you want is just out of reach. A beach body 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 hoped for is put on hold indefinitely?

Kate Bowler believed that life was a series of unlimited choices, only to find that she was stuck in a cancerous body at age 35. In her instant New York Times bestselling book, No Cure for Being Human, Kate searches for a way forward as she mines the wisdom (and absurdity) of our modern \u201cbest life now\u201d advice industry, which offers us exhausting positivity, trying to convince us that we can out-eat, out-learn and out-perform our humanness. With dry wit and unflinching honesty, she grapples with her cancer diagnosis, her ambition, and her faith and searches for some kind of peace with her limitations in a culture that says that anything is possible.

In facing down cancer, Kate searches for hope without cheap optimism, and truth with room for mystery. We are as fragile as the day we were born, and we will need each other if we\u2019re going to tell the truth: Life is beautiful and terrible, full of hope and despair and everything in between, but there\u2019s no cure for being human.

Source: https://katebowler.com/no-cure-for-being-human/

About the\xa0author

Kate Bowler is a New York Times best-selling author, podcast host, and associate professor of the history of Christianity in North America at Duke University. After being unexpectedly diagnosed with Stage IV cancer at age 35, she wrote the New York Times best-selling memoir, Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I\u2019ve Loved), which tells the story of her struggle to understand the personal and intellectual dimensions of the American belief that all tragedies are tests of character. Her TED talk on the subject has received over 9 million views to date, and on her popular podcast, Everything Happens, she talks with people about what they have learned in dark times and why it is so difficult to speak frankly about suffering.

Source: https://katebowler.com/no-cure-for-being-human/

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Big idea #1\u200a\u2014\u200aYour best life\xa0now

We\u2019re obsessed with living well, optimizing everything, following people like Tony Robbins and those who promise us all the good things that will come from mastering our habits, enhancing our bodies, and that salvation is only a decision away.

Kate says that \u201cevery year billions of dollars are pumped into a wellness industry defined by the theory that we can be perfected. We can organize ourselves, heal ourselves, budget ourselves, love ourselves, and eat well enough to make ourselves whole.\u201d

But of course, none of that is true.

And it\u2019s one thing being bombarded with all of those messages on a regular day, but what does that all mean when you\u2019ve had a serious and potentially terminal health diagnosis? When spending time and the idea of productivity take on whole completely different meetings.

It\u2019s not really enough to live our best life. We need to think about it in a slightly different way in order to spend time well. And we need to think about the promises made by advertising and marketing and the so-called gurus, in a more suspicious way. Because maybe we can\u2019t live our best life now, because we can\u2019t control everything.

Big idea #2\u200a\u2014\u200aUnfinished cathedrals

Hang gliding, swimming with dolphins, and a world of other experiences have made their way into the experience economy; the things you must do before you die. We put them on bucket lists and it all suggests that life can be successfully completed.

It\u2019s much easier to count items than to know what counts.

We think that we can master the world by conquering our inner world.

But we can\u2019t. Life can\u2019t be completed, no matter what Instagram tells us. And that\u2019s what makes it great. Kate tells a story about a trip to Lisbon, Portugal, and to a cathedral that was never finished. The story goes that the plans for the cathedral construction became so over-complicated that they just stopped and left it \u2018beautifully unfinished\u2019, as she said.

It was interesting to see different people\u2019s reactions to the cathedral. Kate and her husband thought it was a bit ugly, and bit rough around the edges. But an older man that was there visiting as well was exclaiming at how beautiful it was, which made them see it in a different way. A nice metaphor for life.

She talks about the fact that time is a circle, and that \u2018we\u2019re trapped between the past that we can\u2019t return to and a future that is uncertain\u2019. And therefore \u2018it takes guts and courage to live in this hard space between anticipation and realization\u2019.

All of our masterpieces are ridiculous, all of our striving unnecessary, and all of our work unfinished and unfinishable. We do too much, never enough and are done before we\u2019ve even started. And that is better that way.

Quite a nice antidote to the overwhelm we put ourselves through on a regular basis around trying to \u2018complete\u2019 everything.

Big idea #3\u200a\u2014\u200aA painful\xa0reminder

Nobody wants a reminder of how all of us teeter on the edge between life and death on a daily basis. Kate talks about a friend who had a very unwell child who said that she felt like she was \u2018everyone\u2019s inspiration, but nobody\u2019s friend\u2019. It\u2019s very hard to maintain some relationships during a long illness or a long, drawn out traumatic experience in life.

It\u2019s hard to hear the dramas of everyday life with the same feelings when you\u2019re having to brush over your stories about scans, tests, results you\u2019re waiting on, and specialist appointments. She talks about the bubbling resentment that that comes with hearing people were getting upset about ruining some clothes in the wash by putting something of the wrong color in the machine, or their weight loss dramas etc. It\u2019s a very evident show of the different realities that people can live in.

But Kate also talks about the hard fact that so much of the clarity and purpose that you can get from suffering quickly slides away. She talks about having to relearn and remember how to live \u2018normally\u2019, with all of life\u2019s uncertainty which has just become incredibly clear. It\u2019s not something we like to be reminded of, but none of us know what will happen in a given moment, and some of us have had \u2018certain\u2019 futures upended or even erased altogether.

This doesn\u2019t mean we can\u2019t exist. It just takes courage in order to do so.

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