New Year’s Resolutions vs “aggressive futurism” with Kate Bowler - Part 2

Published Jan 1, 2024, 8:00 AM

Is acceptance overrated? What happens when you have to face a new year without your person in it (or without the health you used to have!)?  In this special two-part episode, we face the new year together - with special guest, historian, author, and queen of awkward conversations, Kate Bowler. 

 

In part 2 of this episode we cover 

 

  • How do you have hope for the year to come when right now maybe isn’t so great? 
  • Acceptance, moving forward, and ferocious self-advocacy
  • The Math of Suffering: this year, last year, and measuring love
  • Why social bonds matter, and what happens when no one sees you



We're re-releasing some of our favorite episodes from the first 3 seasons. This episode was originally recorded in 2021.

 

Looking for a creative exploration of grief? Check out the best selling Writing Your Grief course here.



About our guest:

Kate Bowler, PhD, is an associate professor of the history of Christianity in North America at Duke Divinity School. Author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved). Her latest book, No Cure For Being Human (and Other Truths I Need to Hear), grapples with her diagnosis, her ambition, and her faith as she tries to come to terms with limitations in a culture that says anything is possible. 

 

Find her at katebowler.com and follow her on social media @katecbowler

 

About Megan: 

Psychotherapist Megan Devine is one of today’s leading experts on grief, from life-altering losses to the everyday grief that we don’t call grief. Get the best-selling book on grief in over a decade, It’s Ok that You’re Not OK, wherever you get books. Find Megan @refugeingrief

 

Additional resources:

Read Kate Bowler’s memoir Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved)

 

Read Kate’s latest book No Cure For Being Human (and Other Truths I Need to Hear)

 

Want to talk with Megan directly? Join our patreon community for live monthly Q&A grief clinics: your questions, answered. Want to speak to her privately? Apply for a 1:1 grief consultation here

 

Check out Megan’s best-selling books - It’s OK That You're Not OK and How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed

 

Books and resources may contain affiliate links.

This is it's okay that You're not okay, and I'm your host, Megan Devine. This week on the show, part two of my Stellar Conversation with historian and author doctor Kate Boehler, it's a re release of one of your favorite episodes from season one, complete with listener Q and a. All of that coming up right after this first break before we get started. Two quick notes. One, this episode is an encore performance. I am on break working on a giant new project, so we're releasing a mix of our favorite episodes from the first three seasons of the show. This episode is from season one, in which I answered listener questions, sometimes on my own, sometimes with a guest. So if you want more of these Q and A style episodes, you can find the entire collection from season one wherever you get your podcasts. Second note, while we cover a lot of emotional relational territory in our time here together, this show is not a substitute for skilled support with the license mental health provider or for professional supervision and related to your work. I really want you to take what you learn here, take your thoughts and your reflections out into your own world, and talk about it all all right, everybody, Welcome back. Glad you're still here with Kate Baler and I talking about New Year's even the change of the Gregorian calendar and resolutions is what we're going to talk about next. So this next listener question is related to something I want to spend a good chunk of time on the New year, and specifically the end of the New year, is about setting resolutions, usually resolutions to become better and better versions of yourself, which, honestly, when you think about it, is kind of rude, this idea that you need to take some inventory, figure out where you're screwing things up, and commit to doing them better. So I could rant on this for a while, but I want to read you something from Kate's book, No Cure for Being Human from the introduction, as I think Kate talks about this really well here. American culture has popular theories about how to build a perfect life. You can have it all if you just learned 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 and traffic, attempting your new breathing practice, or in the pre dawn minutes when you could be working out. I've seen these guides to endless progress for sale in airport kiosks. Some are written by spiritual guides, promising to reveal God's 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 mid air. Carp A dum, try the four 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. There are formulas for a meaningful life, how to live one and how to end one. But the truth is somewhere inside me. There is no formula. We live, and we are loved, and we are gone. And you can hear it in my voice, everybody. That's a rough passage, it's a beautiful passage. And I think it's really appropriate as we walk into the changing of the calendar, the changing of the year, and talking about this relentless annual need to write down the ways that we're failing.

Let's talk about that.

Nice emotional intro for you hand in that right.

Off, well and thank you for loving me, and that that is just that mean that means so much to me because when we think about what we could do, like how we could stretch and flex and try, like we're also just like overwhelmed with with a feeling of finitude, with our limits, with our resources, of which are feeling that we're always hoping for something and it's almost like we can feel the leash kind of pulled back on us over and over and over again. And it's like a category in my head I sort of think about, is we're given a story about unlimited agency, just everything is going to be bigger, better, best life now and near's resolutions are like that, in a nutshell, you're always going to be better. And then you know, and we know intuitively we don't want the opposite. We don't want nothing can ever be better. Despair. We're very concerned. Americans are always very concerned. They'll immediately slide to despair. But the feeling in the middle is like, how can we come up with some version of like limited agency, the feeling like it is okay to be inside of numbered days, inside of our fragile bodies, that a friend can read a passage from you and know that like that, hope is really hard if it's found at all. So I feel such a struggle every time we get to the new year, because I love the feeling of trying, like that open lane, feeling like when did your sales kind of go go go? And then I'm also just aware that this has been a season and a long stretch of a lot of accumulating losses, and so each little hope feels a little extra tender right now.

And that's a beautiful lead into our next question, which is really a question about the impossibility of hope. Yeah, so this question is from a healthcare worker. They just noted that they were a healthcare worker. They didn't say what industry or which kind of healthcare worker. And here's our question. Can you two talk about the weight of yet another year of COVID ahead of us with no end in sight, the grief of giving so much as providers with little progress towards any resolution and of the virus, the loss of continued moral support or even respect towards healthcare workers from the general public. How do we realistically face what we know is coming and still find hope in a new year ahead? Will next year be better? Will it bring more grief and endless death? How do I find motivation to create goals for myself in a new year when this is what I live?

I mean spoken like someone who knows the cost of trying and then seeing everything treadmill style slide back right to a standstill. It's also such a special quality of the people that I've met in healthcare who they have a wonderful bravery about them where they it's like a bright clarity like other people can afford to become delusional about what everything costs, like all the tiny little and it'll be this, like this pace in the er, and it will be this amount of turnover rooms, and it will be this this holding this person's hand like it's just it's one thing to say, oh, let's talk about optimism, and it's a very different thing to say, let's talk about optimism with someone who genuinely understands the cost, and it hit feels like they have hit every branch all the way down. I was in the hospital for something recently and I would just almost pass over. Then silence. But I had this wonderful nurse who I just I got to know overnight, because that's you know, when you live in the yar for a little bit, you really get to know your people. And she had just lost her husband. She's in her thirties, and she said, I don't know how to describe what it's like for me to be here, because being here, in a way, everything makes sense, Like I like the logic of suffering is everywhere, and I feel it, and I feel myself of service, like it was such a gorgeous it was such a gorgeous, brave, cool, terrible thing to say. And no, and yet I know she needs to go home and make dinner and take care of kids and move the weight of her life forward in light of what she knows. And that's what that question reminds me of. Is like for the person who is born the greatest cost, how much will a little more hope cost me? And unfortunately, I think hope is very expensive. I would only make one distinction. I would just say it is okay to let go of the exhausting optimism that our culture feeds us, and it is really okay to let go, Like there's no version of crowding onto the happy side of the spectrum that is anything more than a burden to someone like that who knows and yet we are creatures of hope and that we need little, beautiful, glittering truths in our lives that can pull us forward into a future we can barely look at directly. So part of it for me is just defining what hope means to me. Hope is if it's not blind optimism, what lovely truths are enough to feel like they can carry me into a new year.

I love that it brings me back to what we were talking about earlier with the math of suffering, right, And you know, we're doing a lot of emotional cost benefit analysis here, yes, right, Like what is what does optimism cost me? What is hope cost me? And I also really like how beautifully you framed the dissonance between our cultural belief in optimism and possibility and the right mindset and how not just hollow but utterly completely freaking useless that mindset is when you know the kinds of things that this person, this listener knows when you know what you know, Kate about how little control we have over good things happening or even bad things happening, but like the amount of control or the amount of effect that optimism has for us, and you mentioned this actually a few minutes ago. We don't just have that binary of two options. If you're not being optimistic, you're being pessimistic, and therefore you're doing it wrong.

Yeah.

I think that's sort of our default when we hear somebody struggling, especially with something like what this listener described, which I know is the experience for a lot of healthcare workers right now. The temptation to be like, find some beauty in there, find some optimism, find what moves you forward, all of these things, and it sort of skips over the fact that there is an emptiness below being empty.

Yeah, and that.

Is where a lot of people live, right.

Yeah. It must be strange when the suffering makes sense, Like you're it's like, well, a certain kind of wisdom, right, and you're in your job and you're like, wow, all this suffering really makes sense. I know how to live here like this? Yeah, And I also need to have a feeling of small agency, the dignity of being able to make choices and then see them come to fruition. They're like that grace of a little bit of like existential rest that we all need. It's such a unique existential weight to that, to that kind of to this very hope expensive profession is to know. Then if we know that a certain version of optimism can be poison, we know that, and we also need to note that like some things are I always think of it kind of like like graces, Like they're just little the things that are so good they kind of just create a little boost in us, like the feeling of being really like the particularity of us seen and loved, you know, the like long glass of wine for me, and like a friend where someone where I get to the end of a thought and then I get to have another one, like the luxury of that. Like those little graces feel to me like they're they're kind of things that fuel hope in me. They let me feel things could change, and we all need deep down to feel like, even in the midst of so much stuckness, that things really can change, even just a little.

Right that we have some agency and that this there's a stopping point or a rest stop. Maybe not a stopping point, but I also really like that that application there of these things, these tiny snippets of hope or beauty or rest or connection. They aren't cures for this. Having a really good t date with an awesome friend who gets you is not going to fix the situation for healthcare workers. Right, So we're not talking about applied hope as a solution. We're talking about companions Like where where is there another channel?

Yeah, otherwise we'd have another formula, because if there was a formula, we would have one. There isn't.

Yeah, well we do have we do have math, like we have we have the toxic math, right, which says, think the right thoughts, focus on the positive, dream your best life, believe it, to live it, all of these things and then things will work out for the best. And if they don't work out the way that you dream for, then something even bigger and better is happening. Like that is the math that we inherit and that we swim in to mix some weird metaphors here, But that's toxic math, right, that's not real math.

Yeah.

I love this discussion which is strange for me to say about a discussion about math, But I love this idea of the math of human suffering, and so hold that thought, Kate. We got to take an ad break. We will be right back. Stay tuned.

Friends, Near's resolutions will just hand you one.

They'll be like, congratulations. If you are twenty pounds later, people, you'd never be alone. You don't ever have to suffer from the fear of if you finally spend more quality time with your family, even though all you've been doing is with your family in lockdown. I mean, there's just like a whole there's a whole cluster of like tiny exhausting formulas that tell you you know better you is around the corner, and I totally love it. You were like tea is not gonna not going to solve, like you know, job in equality, like like lack of lack of like hours that that affordest dignity and rest. I do love figuring out what what counts as those like the feeling which is just so unique to us as little creatures, like the things that make us feel like we are unclenching our fists. And for me, it is not solo kayaking I tried solo kayaking last week. I facetimed someone in the middle of the lake.

So low kayaking. I heard you. I heard you say solar clacking, and I was like, Oh, so many new weird thing that you've picked up so low kayaking, all right.

I like solar clacking, but yeah, it was I was like, I'm going to be one with nature. I'm going to go out and a kayak. Turns out, I don't want to be alone with nature. I want to be with a friend doing something else. To know.

I love where you're sort of where I hear you going with this, and I want to make sure we have time for a couple of other questions and we can let you release back into your wild with friends here. But I hear you going to how things make you feel and paying exquisite attention to that as a way of looking for those small moments to lay down alongside whatever else is going on in the world.

Yep, yeah, yeah, it doesn't have to be that. I mean, it's sometimes just socks and someone else brushing your hair if you're in the hospital. I love knowing that it's not sort of you know, wizardry. Sometimes it's small concrete delights that make a day.

Yeah, this actually sets us up really nicely for my little riff on New Year's resolutions. I really like this idea instead of coming up with resolutions that are concrete. This is actually a great link back to what you were just saying so beautifully about hope.

Right.

I have a really hard time with the word hope because the way that we use it is like hope in a specific outcome. I hope that my scans are clean. I hope that I make it home before rush hour. Like we're hoping for a specific outcome, and things don't always work like that. That's a shadow agency that we do not have.

Yeah.

I really like hope in how I stay by myself, Hope in how I feel, Hope in how I take care of myself in whatever is ahead. That's a kind of hope that feels functional to me instead of transactional. I like a functional hope rather than a transactional hope. And if we bring this back to New Year's resolutions. I talk about this a little bit in one of my books. Martha Beck talks about it in her book Finding Your North Star. Daniel Laporte has spoken about this before but as a new year, end of new year, or any kind of transition time. But since we're talking about resolutions, instead of looking at concrete we'll lose ten pounds, will gain fifty, like whatever, instead looking at like, how do I want to feel in this coming year? How do I want to feel as I live through the things that I need to live through? And you know, I have some thoughts on that, but I think this is such a deeply personal thing for people, and that practice of asking yourself the question, knowing what I know, knowing what I cannot change, and what doesn't honestly feel very hopeful to me looking ahead, how do I want to feel meeting this life in this new year? I think that opens up more possibility for actual resolutions that mean something. And you don't need to be going through crisis to have, you know, to greet the close of the year in that way. I just I think it's a really kind and humane and supportive way to look at resolutions that doesn't tell you that you're failing somehow and you have to do things different. It's really more of like, can you get deeper into listening to yourself and start ordering your days and your moments in the small ways that you have power control to help yourself feel the way that you want to feel, which is very different than looking for a specific outcome that we don't have a lot of control over.

Yeah, that's right, the hYP berns from entalism over culture. Yep.

Yeah. So we are winding up our time together. I want to let you get back into the math of your life. But I have two questions for you, and I would love to hear your responses for these. So what do you wish your doctors or your providers would have told you about grief anytime during this whole saga of the last several years for you.

I don't think they ever used the word grief. I a one time a PA said the sooner I get used to dying, the better, which honestly was probably one of the worst things anyone's ever said to me. But I don't think anyone ever said grief or even that there would be a process that I'd be going through, because it was I was in that sort of short scan loop where everything just was sort of like living in the eternal present. I think that's something I learned by getting to know palliative care doctors and understanding that the word palliative gave us like a bigger language for learning to work within the limits of our bodies, our hopes, and so I yeah, I think I would have loved it if they just said, well, there's going to be versions of someone you might not be able to be anymore, and let's figure out what a beautiful version of your life looks like now. Just anything to mark the transition, I think would have been a gift to me.

Yeah, just to name it. Going back to what we had talked about earlier about acknowledgment, and the opposite of acknowledgment is invisibility. Yes, so being able to name what is actually happening in the room, Well, yes, that's all right, and I hope that too. And last question. You are an educator, you are a teacher, you are a writer, all of these things. What do you want other educators to know about grief, either in this moment or in general? What do you want other educators to know?

I'm thankful in this version, So I teach it at Divinity School. So I mean half the students go on to academic curse, But the others are the pastors or chaplains that sit with those who are really suffering, and so in that version, especially watching what they've done in the pandemic, they really did teach me about the courage of presence. How scared we are when our words fail, how much we wish we could always be that person who says and says and does the right things. But that the gift of so often like ministry or caring professions of any kind, is the is that what's truly in the courage of showing up and being willing to feel a little embarrassed, of not always knowing and figuring out together. Half the stories they tell me are doing something unbelievably dumb, and then the joy of becoming better. And I think learning to love the intense awkwardness of other people's bodies is such an education, but holy crap, we only learn it by when we show up.

I love that, And that's a beautiful end note for our time here together. Embracing the awkward right, which is exactly what we do here. We only get that life that we want where we feel seen and heard and companioned. And also, I feel like we have some skill in seeing and hearing comparing other people if we embrace being awkward. So thanks for being awkward with me all the time.

Friend, Oh my dear, thank you for having me. It is so fun to be offscript with you.

Woo.

The best stuff happens off script, all right, everybody, Thank you so much.

Kate.

Let everybody know where they can find you. Whatever else you want people to know.

Oh sure, I have a podcast called Everything Happens, which is very medium sad and wherever podcasts around, And they can find me online at Kate C. Bowler and where I sometimes bless the crap out of people, but mostly just news on the cultural scripts of life today. So I'd love to see people there.

Yeah, make sure you follow her on Instagram. Everybody. We will have all of the ways that you can find Kate and the titles of all of her books in the show notes. Stay tuned after the break for things you can do to start practicing this whole showing up for pain thing we always talk about and learn how you can. So I met your questions for me to answer next week. Don't miss that part. Friends, You're right back. Each week. I leave you with some questions to carry with you until we meet again. It's part of that whole. This awkward stuff gets a lot easier with more practice. So I want you to practice this week new Year's resolutions that actually mean something to you as you face the years ahead. Kate and I talked about that idea that you can make a resolution of how you want to feel in the year going forward, rather than things that you want to see happen. Right, let's think about feelings based resolutions instead of transaction vending machine resolutions. So for your I don't really want to call it homework, even though we talked about math in this episode, but your assignment for this end of year season, start working on some how I want to feel resolutions? How do you want to feel in the days and weeks and months ahead. Those feelings based resolutions are a lot more helpful, a lot less shame based, and a lot more supportive than a transactional resolution. And a transactional resolution is things like I will lose fifteen pounds and then I will be happy, or I will overhaul the healthcare system and make sure that everybody gets paid leave. That's a whole other subject. So this week New Year's resolutions that actually mean something. I don't even think you need a whole lot of direction for this week's questions to carry with you because we talked about it in the episode. I really would love you to play around with this idea of a feelings based resolution for yourself for this new year's time, rather than a transactional do this so that I get better type thing. Really lean into how do you want to feel in the days and weeks and months ahead. Try that out, Frinz. Let me know how it goes. You know how most people are going to scan through the show description here and think, I do not want to talk about all that pain stuff. Well here's where you come in your reviews. Let people know it really isn't all that bad. In here we talk about heavy stuff, but it's in the service of making things better for everyone. So everyone should listen. Spread the word in your workplace, in your social world on social media and click through to leave a review. Subscribe to the show, download episodes, and send in your questions. Want more hereafter brief education doesn't just belong to end of life issues. Life is full of losses, from everyday disappointments to events that clearly divide life into before and after. Learning how to talk about all that without cliches or platitudes or simplistic, think positive workplace posters. That's an important skill for everyone. Find trainings, workshops, books and resources for every human trying to make their way in the world after something goes horribly wrong at megandivine dot Co. Hereafter with Megan Divine is written and produced by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown. Co produced by Elizabeth Fozzio, edited by Houston Tilley, and music provided by Wave Crush.