Criticism

“Scared animals return home, regardless of whether home is safe or frightening,” writes Bessel Van Der Kolk in his book, The Body Keeps the Score. Van Der Kolk’s book is about trauma, but its central question is existential: how do we break free of our self-destructive patterns—how do we experience post-traumatic growth? How do we transcend the habits of comfort and familiarity that can keep us from growing? Trauma can freeze its victims in time and within the traumatized body. Post-traumatic growth occurs when a person utilizes creativity, storytelling, and meaning to transform stasis into motion, to make sense of that which has no sense.

Change is a long and difficult process. Sometimes it is so incremental that it cannot be seen directly. I don’t believe we are doomed to repeat the same self-destructive cycles, but the process of breaking these patterns is a long and difficult one. We don’t need to keep drinking to blackout every weekend and regretting it on Monday morning. We don’t need to keep surrendering our agency to relationships, to the vicissitudes of our desires, to the accidents of time and circumstance. We can take control of the narrative.

In his nonfiction book, Van Der Kolk writes about “attractors.” Attractors are the things that “draw us, motivate us, and make us feel alive. Typically, attractors are meant to make us feel better. But sometimes, we are drawn to the same things that make us feel worse, the same patterns that destroy us.

“…why are so many people attracted to dangerous or painful situations?” Van Der Kolk asks. Researchers found that “strong emotions can block pain.” For example, watching a graphically violent movie can create the same analgesic effect as eight milligrams of morphine, “about the same dose a person would receive in an emergency room.”

For some of us, the dangerous is not only thrilling, but it can sometimes be a kind of self-medication against other types of emotional pain.

Sometimes, the dangerous life choice can give us the jolt of endorphins we need so that we don’t feel depressed, anxious, or sad. 

What is the alternative? Happiness is completely contingent on living authentically, honestly, and in facing reality. Van Der Kolk, writes about his “great teacher” Elvin Semrad who said, “The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves.”

I have gotten married, moved to another country, jumped into wild oceans in Hawaii, and climbed cliffs without a rope on the premise that I am unlovable, alone, and can’t trust other people. I have sought these situations for the thrill and also because I was scared of the alternative. I have braved waves big enough to drown men, cliffs tall enough to crush them, and tornadoes wild enough to make trucks jackknife, but I still have trouble saying one word: “help.”

Reality will not be denied its course. We can hide from it, drug from it, run from it, deny it, rage at it, eat ourselves away from it, exercise ourselves into a stupor from it, fuck from it, drink from it, but the only way out of it, is through it—through actually experiencing whatever it is we don’t want to experience.

Trauma is the ultimate expression of self-alienation. The very thing that we need to experience can feel like it has the power to kill us. Van Der Kolk writes, “Trauma, whether it is the result of something done to you or something you yourself have done, almost always makes it difficult to engage in intimate relationships. After you have experienced something so unspeakable, how do you learn to trust yourself or anyone else again?” And how can you connect with those closest to you if you can never talk about an experience so core to your being or so formative? Trauma alienates its survivors from themselves but also from everyone else around them.

The tragedy of trauma is that it destroys the free play of communication, of imagination. Trauma can freeze a person in a place where they can neither transform the traumatic event into something meaningful, nor integrate the experience into the larger course of their lives. The key to growth is integration of experience so that the experience becomes one aspect of a larger story of transformation.

Van Der Kolk explains, “Trauma has shut down their inner compass and robbed them of the imagination they need to create something better.”

For me, the key word here is “imagination.” Creativity. Creation. For the bereaved and the grieving, creativity is not a luxury, nor is it a pastime—it is a life and death matter. To create is to take charge of your life. Grief can knock us to our knees, but creativity, art, and writing can give us agency again and help us invent new ground to stand upon. Reality might be difficult right now in this era of massive job losses and global pandemic, but we still have the agency to shape reality. We can respond to life creatively.

Without creativity and imagination, we run the risk of going through life numb and disconnected from ourselves, unable to know what is upsetting us, feeling like something is wrong, but unable to put it into words. To live like this is to be alive and not living.

At the heart of the traumatic situation or challenging experience is the seeming meaninglessness of it all. What meaning can there be in losing a child, a parent, or a friend? What meaning can we find in pandemic? In war? In assault?

The question of trauma is always one of transformation. And transformation requires us to see the larger story, one of transcendence and triumph. This is at the heart of post-traumatic growth. But to tell the story of your life, you need to own the story and have control of the narrative. You need to give yourself permission to be the protagonist of your own life.

For Van Der Kolk the answer lies in agency: “‘agency’ is the technical term for the feeling of being in charge of your life: knowing where you stand, knowing that you have a say in what happens to you, knowing that you have some ability to shape your circumstances.”

Often that means telling an inconvenient story, or an uncomfortable story. It sometimes means disappointing other people.

Tell it anyway. Disappoint other people.Poetry and art, if it is to be good, must be willing to blaspheme, and say that which cannot be said. It must be willing to be ugly. It must be willing to go anywhere the human heart can go, and that is literally anywhere. We must be willing to peer into the abattoir of our souls and make sense of what we find there.

By being honest about ourselves, by attending to our needs, by addressing the unspeakable, we become fully human.

We tell ourselves lies in order to live. And yet the lies we tell ourselves in order to go on living so often prevent us from living. For Van Der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score, post-traumatic growth comes through words, images, and creations that allow us to face the unspeakable, the unsayable, and the unknowable.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

When I lived in New York City, one of my most beloved rituals was to attend Josh Korda’s Dharma Punx NYC meetings. Every Monday and Tuesday, Korda, along with a group of New Yorkers in various states of tattoo coverage, would gather together to meditate. For me, the meditation was a bonus; I was there for the group therapy. Korda is not only knowledgeable in the intricacies of the Pali cannon and in various meditation techniques, but he is also well-versed in psychology, attachment theory, and neuroscience. Listening to him speak about Buddhism and psychology is like watching a skilled dancer move seamlessly between punk, hip hop and ballet. A few years ago he wrote a nonfiction book called Unsubscribe in which he talks about his conversion from living the life of an advertising agency executive to being a Buddhist pastor. The book provides practical tools to seekers looking for ways to opt out of “capitalism’s Yellow Brick Road of workaholism, careerism, consumerism, fame seeking, and social media-reputation fixation…”

I attended Korda’s group sessions less for the meditation and more for the group therapy they provided. I’d been in and out of therapy myself for years, but I found that Korda provided real tools I could use in my daily life and in my meditation. Listening to his talks made me feel better. To this day, on insomniac nights when I want to take a drink to knock myself out, I find that I can turn on Josh’s podcast instead, and be lulled to sleep usually within an hour, with some added wisdom to boot. Usually the things he says gives me practical tools to address the very things in my life causing the anxiety.

Now that New York City is on lockdown due to Covid-19, Korda has been holding his meetings on Zoom.

One of the things I missed dearly since moving from New York City to Honolulu was attending Josh’s Dharma Punx sessions. And while I am saddened to think that the Dharma Punx have had to stop meeting in their beautiful New York City spaces, one of the strange benefits of the pandemic was that it brought Dharma Punx back into my life.

“I find that saying something makes me nervous, makes me less nervous doing it,” Josh said at the start of his first Zoom meeting podcast. Dharma Punx, explained Korda, was less about the talks and the meditation than about the people who gathered together. And indeed, the energy in the room when Josh would speak was often palpable, even when his voice would occasionally get drowned out by the sound of a siren passing on the Bowery. I found myself missing it as I sat in my Honolulu living room, listening to the wind blow through the open window, grateful to be back at a meeting, especially in these strange times.

I’d often go to the New York Dharma Punx meetings and not speak to a single soul, only to spend the next hour listening to Josh lecture on the importance of forming meaningful social connections. Josh would often remind his attendees that meditation could only help them if they could also supplement it with the more important practice of forming meaningful and secure attachments. Josh’s talks were a reminder to nurture the relationships that were most important to me. I often left his meetings wondering if I was nurturing my relationships as I should. Was I reaching out to loved ones enough?

Korda’s thoughts on the pandemic were similarly helpful. He identified some of the stressors we all are facing:

1. COVID-19 Itself. Sickness, and the fear of sickness is an incredible stressor. Those of us who are healthy may be worried for family and loved ones who are more vulnerable to the worst symptoms of this virus. And the young and healthy have no guarantee that they won’t suffer the worst symptoms. We are all vulnerable to this disease and it is likely to touch each of our lives personally.
2. Economic Uncertainty. So many of us have lost jobs, and many are uncertain whether our jobs will continue to exist.
3. Uncertainty in General. We struggle when we can’t predict what might happen next. Korda explains that our brains are “predicting machines.” When we cannot adequately anticipate future events, our dopamine levels can drop, resulting in lack of motivation and general malaise.
4. Social Distancing. For Josh, this is the worse stressor of the pandemic. He explains that “social connections help us self-regulate.” In his second Zoom talk on the pandemic Josh explained that in the early days of New York’s lockdown, he watched as other meditation instructors shifted seamlessly to giving talks online or on Zoom. He explained that, while he tried to put together a talk, he wasn’t able to do it. Was he failing, he wondered? He reminded his listeners that lack of productivity in the midst of a global pandemic is not a failing, but rather, the mind and the body’s natural reaction to trauma, shock, and uncertainty. Josh urged his listeners to take time to pause and reflect.

Josh went on to explain that when we are faced with overwhelming stress, we might turn to maladaptive strategies to manage our response. When we cannot connect with other people to calm us or to self-regulate, we might turn to alcohol, drugs, food, binge-watching Netflix, videogames, compulsive shopping, and other addictive behaviors. We might oscillate between complete shutdown (sleeping all day and feeling the general malaise that comes when we feel we cannot deal), or become hypervigilant, checking the news obsessively, constantly on-edge, exhausted.

Some simple solutions Josh offered including encouraging listeners to exercise and eat healthy foods high in tyrosine, a precursor for dopamine (Josh mentioned almonds, bananas eggs, beans, fish, and avocados, some of which I plan to eat for breakfast this morning). He encouraged us all to sit up straight because posture can help us feel more capable. If it was safe to do so, he encouraged us to take walks, to listen to calming music, to cook, to garden, to draw, to sing. If we could, we were urged to spend time in nature.

As far as meditation goes, he reviewed various practices that included focusing on the breath, or focusing on loving kindness. We could remember those we have helped and those who have helped us, or work on gratitude. We could practice expansive visualizations, or place our hands over our hearts while breathing deeply, or we could imagine ourselves surrounded by helpful guiding spirits.

As Josh spoke, I realized how in many ways, I’d built my own life around Josh’s simple and helpful suggestions. I thought about how Josh’s simple practices have changed my life. As I worked to improve my life, I made it a priority to exercise regularly, eat healthily, connect with others, and spend time in nature. Over time, I realized that New York City didn’t give me the access to the ocean that I yearned for, and over a year ago, I moved to Hawaii. I credit Josh’s regular exhortations to follow your authentic self and to “opt out,” with giving me some of the courage I needed to make the leap.

In his nonfiction book, Unsubscribe, Korda writes about how we can change our lives by “skillfully prioritizing our goals,” understanding and integrating “our feelings and emotions into our problem-solving routines,” and connecting “authentically with those around us.” I turn to his nonfiction book time and again in times of uncertainty. We all have time on our hands. If you haven’t done so already, read Unsubscribe, and check out Josh Korda’s “Pandemic Talk” available at Dharma Punx NYC.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

This book recommendation list is the work of a lifetime of reading and studying. While book recommendation is by its very nature a highly personal endeavor, in my analysis of the top book recommendation lists online, I find that similar books keep appearing again and again. There are books that are considered compelling, life-changing, and transformative based on the general consensus, and then there are books I’ve read that never appear on book recommendation lists, but I think they are worth mentioning here.

I have lived a life immersed in books. For a time I worked as a book reviewer for Publisher’s Weekly, and before that, I spent years thinking and writing about books while working as an English and SAT tutor, and even before that while earning my M.F.A. in creative writing at Columbia University. Books offered solace when I was alone, they helped me make better choices, helped me be braver, wiser, and more adventurous.

These are the books I’ve read over the years that have helped me shape my moral compass and thinking. They have helped me become braver by exposing me to stories of women and men who have been brave. They have helped me feel less alone by offering me solace and companionship. They have helped me sharpen my thinking about major issues facing the environment and the world by revealing the world to me in its beautiful and brilliant complexity. I’ve divided my book recommendations into several categories. Happy reading and exploring! By buying the books by clicking the links you can support local bookstores and also my work as an independent book reviewer.

Over 100 Books to Read Before Your Die:

• 30 Essential Books to Read Before You Die
• Books that Helped Me Get a High SAT English Score, Without a Tutor
• Books to Help You Become a Better Writer
• Poetry Book Recommendations
• A Feminist Reading List
• Books to Read After a Breakup
• Books to Make You Laugh
• Best Adventure Books
• Best Science Books
• Books Almost as Good as Therapy
• Best Meditation Books
• Books to Help You Live Your Best Life

30 Essential Books to Read Before You Die

There are some books that are essential reading for living. These are the classics and the foundation. From Dante Alighieri’s rigorous assessment of the ways in which love and desire can lead us astray in The Divine Comedy to Hamlet’s meditation on the nature of indecision and about how we are all ultimately strangers to ourselves, these are books that reveal something intrinsic about human life, love, the soul, living, and dying.

1. The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Dante Alighieri
2. The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio, Dante Alighieri
3. The Divine Comedy: Paradiso, Dante Alighieri
4. Hamlet, William Shakespeare
5. Middlemarch, George Eliot
6. The Death of Ivan Illich, Leo Tolstoy
7. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
8. 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9. Beloved, Toni Morrison
10. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
11. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
12. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
13. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
15. Dubliners, James Joyce
16. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
17. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
18. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austin
19. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
20. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
21. The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald
22. Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace
23. Tiny Beautiful Things, Cheryl Strayed
24. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
25. Narrow Road to the Interior, Basho
26. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle
27. The Pillow Book, Sei Shonagon
28. The Giver, Lois Lowry
29. The Lady with the Little Dog, Anton Chekhov
30. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Books that Helped Me Get a High SAT English Score, Without a Tutor

There are plenty of books out there that will teach you study skills, and organizational skills; books that will teach you how to focus, how to get into the best schools, but the books that made me a better student were the books that inspired me. If you want to be a better student, read books about things that fascinate you. Follow your curiosity. Don’t rely on this list alone.

We best learn how to study by watching a mind active with itself. A mind active with itself is a mind present to possibility at every moment. The reality is that study is a never-ending process. We are always studying, even when we are living life. These are some books that helped me become a better student, both inside and outside the classroom.

In high school, my parents didn’t have the money to pay for expensive tutors to help me get a good SAT score. I still got a very good SAT English score without a tutor. I did this by reading many books, and by challenging myself to read more difficult books. Moreover, I didn’t just sit down and read these books, but rather, I read actively. That is, I looked up the definitions of words I didn’t know and took notes about the way the books made me think and feel. I kept a reading journal.

Whether you want to improve your vocabulary to get a higher SAT score without sitting around all day learning vocabulary lists, or if you’re in AP English and want to read challenging books that will help you sharpen your analytic skills, these are a few books that helped me immensely when I was in high school. And even if you’re not in high school, but just want to improve your vocabulary and reading ability, these are challenging books that offer a great place to begin this journey.

The trick with these books is not to read them fast, but to read them slowly. Read them once; then re-read. As you read, keep a vocabulary journal and write down the definition of any new word you encounter that you do not know. If you encounter the same word again and still don’t know it, write it down again. If the author makes a literary allusion (that is, a reference to something you have never seen or heard before) Google it and learn about it.

If you’re reading these books to improve your SAT score, remember that a strong and varied vocabulary coupled with strong reading and analytical skills is the key to getting a higher SAT English score. This means that as you read, you should also be trying to analyze the text. Berkeley provides an excellent and detailed list of AP Literature Terms you’ll need to know. As you read these books, can you identify the literary devices in the text? Set yourself the challenge of finding at least one literary term per page. If you can do this, you’ll be on your way to getting a higher SAT score and AP English score, without a tutor.

1. Mary Shelley’s, Frankenstein
2. Jane Austen, Emma
3. Beloved, Toni Morrison
4. Hamlet, William Shakespeare
5. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
6. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
7. Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl
8. Romeo & Juliet, William Shakespeare
9. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
10. Paradise Lost, John Milton
11. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
12. The Odyssey, Homer
13. Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
14. Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
15. The Metamorphosis, Ovid
16. Confessions, St. Augustine
17. David Foster Wallace, This is Water
18. A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
19. To Build a Fire and Other Stories, Jack London
20. The Awakening, Kate Chopin

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Books to Help You Become a Better Writer

There are many books out there that promise to help you write better. The best way to improve your writing is to read more books you love. Read deeply, widely, and rigorously. Write daily and often. But, if you want some guidance along the way, here are a few books that helped me think about my own writing differently. I’ve included some books that also explore the creative process and the life of an artist, because if you plan to be a professional writer, understanding how creativity works, and being able to embrace failure is also important. As a professional writer and poet, these are a few guidebooks that offer beautiful maps into the creative process:

1. Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
2. On Writing, Stephen King
3. The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr
4. Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed Conversations with Paul Cronin
5. Ernest Hemingway, A Movable Feast
6. The Crack Up, F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. Changing my Mind, Zadie Smith
8. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, For Dummies

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Poetry Book Recommendations

All of us write poetry from time to time, but only some of us actually try to become poets. If the latter ambition is for you, the best way to be a better poet is to start with Chaucer, work your way through Shakespeare, slog through John Milton, and make your way to the contemporaries. If you don’t want to be a poet, but want to be well-read in poetry, this list is for you. I offer classic poems and some modern and contemporary writers I love. Again, as with every list, there will be gaps.

1. The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet
2. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
3. Troilus and Criseyde, Geoffrey Chaucer
4. Paradise Lost, John Milton
5. The Odyssey, Homer
6. The Metamorphosis, Ovid
7. The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Dante Alighieri
8. The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio, Dante Alighieri
9. The Divine Comedy: Paradiso, Dante Alighieri
10. The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne
11. Rimbaud Complete, Arthur Rimbaud
12. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake
13. Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats
14. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
15. The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
16. Opened Ground, Seamus Heaney
17. Donald Justice, Collected Poems
18. Philip Larkin Collected Poems
19. The Poetry of Pablo Neruda
20. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
21. Eliot: Poems (T.S. Eliot)
22. Cold Mountain Poems by Han Shan Translated by Gary Snyder
23. The Dream of a Common Language, Adrienne Rich
24. The Spring of My Life, Kobayashi Issa
25. Narrow Road to the Interior, Basho
26. Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems
27. Dime Store Alchemy, Charles Simic
28. The Complete Poems, Elizabeth Bishop
29. Poems, Maya Angelou
30. Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems
31. Lorca Collected Poems
32. Rita Dove Collected Poems
33. Wallace Stevens: Selected Poems
34. The Complete Poems of Cavafy
35. Frank O’Hara: Selected Poems
36. Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose
37. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry: Contemporary Poetry

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A Feminist Reading List

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “feminism” as “advocacy of equality of the sexes and the establishment of the political, social, and economic rights of the female sex.” The OED notes that feminism really took off during the French and American revolutions, when thought leaders were re-thinking various institutions; redefining the idea of the nation itself and revitalizing antiquated religious structures. Feminism focused on creating equality for women regarding the right to property, the right to vote, and a more egalitarian view of marriage. The first wave of feminism focused on granting women the right to vote, economic freedom from the marital bond, and equal rights to property. The second wave of feminism focused on social structures, like pay disparities and bias against women in cultural portrayals, in the workplace, and in various areas of social, cultural, and economic thought. The third wave of feminism focuses on the unique challenges that women of color face and brings diverse voices into the feminist fold.

Feminism is so much more than all of this. It really is a way of looking at the world. Here are some books that helped me better understand my own feminism and also helped me grow as a feminist, but if you know nothing about feminism at all and want to learn more about the subject, these books and writers also offer an excellent way in.

1. A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
2. Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit
3. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
4. My Life on the Road, Gloria Steinem
5. The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon
6. The Awakening, Kate Chopin
7. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle
8. Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz
9. Wild, Cheryl Strayed
10. Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion
11. Dream of a Common Language, Adrienne Rich
12. Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay

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Books to Read After a Breakup

Nothing can be as world-shaking and identity-altering as your first real breakup. For me, my first breakup also happened to be my divorce, so I was dealing with not only the untangling of two lives that had become intertwined financially, socially, and spiritually, but also dealing with all the consequences that come when you get divorced young. I was just 30 years old. Your first big breakup is a unique opportunity to take stock of your life. What aspects of yourself did you sacrifice for your partner? What aspects of your life do you want to focus upon and grow? Growth can be painful, and breakups are indeed painful, but books can help us on the journey. Here are some books I read after my divorce and first big breakup that helped me get through it all.

1. Wild, Cheryl Strayed
2. Eat, Pray, Love. Elizabeth Gilbert
3. Tiny Beautiful Things, Cheryl Strayed
4. The Art of Asking, Amanda Palmer
5. When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron
6. The Places that Scare You, Pema Chodron
7. The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin
8. My Life on the Road, Gloria Steinem
9. Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett & Dave Evans
10. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
11. The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts
12. You are a Badass, Jen Sincero
13. De Profundis, Oscar Wilde
14. Lit, Mary Karr
15. Without, Donald Hall
16. The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls

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Books to Make You Laugh

Sometimes we just need a good laugh. Of course, everyone’s sense of humor is different, and mine tends to veer toward the irreverent and the dark. That said, here are the authors and books that always make me squirt coffee out through my nose.

1. Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris
2. When You Are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris
3. Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Jenny Lawson
4. Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, Amy Schumer
5. Bossypants, Tina Fey
6. The Fran Liebowitz Reader
7. Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace
8. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace
9. The Possessed, Elif Batuman
10. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Lawrence Sterne

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Best Adventure Books

I’ve lived out of my car, lived out of a tent, climbed mountains, surfed waves, and have gotten lost in the woods more times than I can count. That said, I still love a good adventure book. Here are some books that have inspired me to venture further, take more risks, and be braver.

1. Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
2. Into thin Air, Jon Krakauer
3. Barbarian Days, A Surfing Life, William Finnegan
4. I Promise to be Good, the Letters of Arthur Rimbaud
5. The Wave, Susan Casey
6. Werner Herzog–A Guide for the Perplexed, Conversations with Paul Cronin
7. Voices in the Ocean, Susan Casey
8. Wild, Cheryl Strayed
9. Vertigo, W.G. Sebald
10. The Lost Art of Finding Our Way, John Edward Huth
11. Hawaiki Rising, Sam Low
12. Alone on the Wall, Alex Honnold
13. Longitude, Dava Sobel
14. Walden, Henry David Thoreau
15. The Road, Cormack McCarthy
16. A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit
17. My Life on the Road, Gloria Steinem
18. Touching the Void, Joe Simpson

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Best Science Books

If you love discovering how the world works as much as I do, but you want to do it in a literary way, and don’t necessarily want to slog through a Physics 101 textbook, these are some well-written science books that are not only metaphorically beautiful, but world-expanding lessons on the physical and biological world. These books are foundational, not only for science, but also helped shaped the metaphors and language of the arts, the literary world, and culture as we know it. From Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem in mathematics, these books are beautifully readable, even for a poetry major like me.

1. QED, Richard P. Feynman
2. Relativity, Albert Einstein
3. The Accidental Universe, Alan Lightman
4. Black Holes and Baby Universes, Stephen Hawking
5. Six Easy Pieces, Richard P. Feynman
6. Awakenings, Oliver Sacks
7. Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas R. Hofstadter
8. Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, David Foster Wallace
9. The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D.
10. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Atul Gawande
11. On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
12. The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee
13. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
14. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks

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Books Almost as Good as Therapy

I’ve seen several therapists over the course of my life, and some therapists have been incredibly helpful. If you’re struggling with depression, anxiety, or with life challenges, a good therapist can offer personalized guidance and support that can’t be found in a book. Mental illness, bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety runs in my family and I’ve needed help coping with my own illnesses from time to time. I’ve found reading the right books coupled with therapy to be incredibly helpful. There’s nothing as beneficial as having someone to talk to for an hour or two a week, and then having a few good books to carry with you in the meantime. I’ve struggled with depression, anxiety, difficult relationships, and challenging family dynamics. These are the books that have helped me re-imagine and re-think my own trauma, my own self-limiting thought patterns, and unconscious beliefs. They have helped me grow immensely.

1. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Dummies. Forgive the title; the exercises in this book transformed my life. Seriously.
2. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. If you’re dealing with trauma, childhood trauma, or want to learn more about how childhood upbringing impacts the way you cope with life now, this is an excellent book.
3. Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, Cheryl Strayed. Sometimes you just need to hear good advice from a compassionate voice. Cheryl Strayed is that voice. I’ve cried myself to sleep over this book and found strength to go on when I didn’t know how I’d keep going thanks to Strayed’s calm and kind voice.
4. When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi. Struggling with mortality, or a loved one’s mortality? This one is an excellent journey that takes you on one man’s search for meaning in the face of death.
5. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion. This is essential reading if you’re coping with grief.
6. Braving the Wilderness, Brene Brown.
7. Rising Strong, Brene Brown.
8. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo. Because sometimes the thing you need to do to fix your mind is to fix your space.
9. You are a Badass, Jen Sincero. I choose this book because even if it isn’t the very best written book on this list, it happened to be the book I was reading when I dislocated my elbow. (No I didn’t dislocate my elbow while actually reading the book; I dislocated my elbow while rock climbing, but that is neither here nor there.) The only thing I remember after the ER doctors gave me the morphine is a conversation I had with the paramedic about this book. I remember saying, “The advice is sound; I just wish the writing were better.” This is a compilation of all the self-help ideas out there. Some are a little out there, but there’s some really useful stuff here. I still stand behind my morphine-haze assessment.
10. The Verbally Abusive Relationship, Patricia Evans.
11. Mindsight, Daniel J. Siegel, M.D.
12. Mating in Captivity, Esther Perel. A book that might save your relationship; at the very least, here’s one to read when going through couple’s therapy.

Return to categories.

Best Meditation Books

My meditation journey has taken me from meditation groups in the Bowery to temples in the Pacific. All along the way, books have guided me and helped me grow my meditation practice. Here are some books I’ve found helpful to become more mindful:

1. In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon
2. The Wisdom of No Escape, Pema Chodron
3. Unsubscribe, Josh Korda
4. A Year to Live, Stephen Levine
5. The Art of Stillness, Pico Iyer
6. The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan W. Watts
7. The Places that Scare You, Pema Chodron
8. Peace is Every Breath, Thich Nhat Hanh
9. When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron
10. The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living, His Holiness the Dalai Lama
11. Siddhartha, Herman Hesse

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Books to Help You Live Your Best Life

Charting a course through life can be challenging. There’s no instruction manual for living, but these books have offered me some insight. For example, making decisions is tough, especially when both choices seem equally compelling. These books have helped me think about decision-making, and some have even helped me make better decisions. In other cases, these books have helped me gain the perspective I’ve needed to help me make different life choices:

1. Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life, Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles
2. A Year to Live, Stephen Levine
3. Unsubscribe, Josh Korda
4. Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
5. The Wisdom of No Escape, Pema Chodron
6. Mating in Captivity, Esther Perel
7. Tiny Beautiful Things, Cheryl Strayed
8. When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi
9. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Dummies
10. The Lost Art of Finding Our Way, John Edward Huth
11. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo
12. In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon
13. Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman

Return to categories.

While the course of each life is distinct, many lives follow similar arcs. We start our lives as students, as members of a family. We form friendships that shape who we will become and challenge us. Our first real relationships and heartbreaks teach us lessons about love and ourselves. We are part of social groups, and are excluded from social groups, and these inclusions and exclusions shape us. We search for our place in the world. We seek adventure or security or home. We are sometimes sad, sometimes happy, sometimes looking to escape, and sometimes in need of a good laugh. Through all these seasons of life, a book, like a sturdy craft, can carry us across the waters of the unknown, can raise a mirror to our own faces, and serve as an altar whereby we can search for our deepest desires, face our darkest fears, and strive to be our best selves.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

One of the most insidious aspects of the Covid-19 virus is the fact that it prevents the dying from being with their loved ones when they pass away. Social distancing and hospital quarantines divide the dying from those they love. Without the ability to hold a loved one’s hand as he or she passes, and without the ability to say goodbye, survivors can be left struggling with unresolved loss. Poetry can often express the inexpressible, and poetry books have the potential to help us cope with the difficult and unsayable. Books, and especially poetry books, have the power to help us navigate the choppy waters of grief. In this book recommendation, I want to look closely at Karen Green’s elegy to her late husband David Foster Wallace, in Bough Down.

We have all been touched by this pandemic in different ways. Some of us have lost loved ones. Others have lost jobs. Some have yet to experience these devastating losses, but are struggling with the loss of normal life, and are navigating loneliness, isolation, hopelessness, and fear about what might come next. All of these losses are real, and in many senses, as a nation, we are all grieving. We are grieving the loss of parties, dinner out with loved ones, coffee shops, sunbathing on the beach, workplace chats, flights, vacations; we are grieving funerals, grieving our routines. We are grieving the loss of jobs. We are grieving the loss of loved ones.

The question now becomes: how do we cope with this grief? Even in this time of loss, stasis, and confusion, I believe we still have a choice about what we are going to do. Even in a time when life seems to have gotten smaller and more circumscribed, we still have the power to create the future.

Some of us might choose to create art, others poetry.

Some might choose to create beautiful meals for their families. Others might create quality time with their children and loved ones. Whatever we create, if we do it with intention, we are transforming the powerlessness of the situation into action, and that makes all the difference.

One artistic form that has helped generations transform the stasis of grief into action is the elegy. The elegy is a poetic form that commemorates the dead. It is a record of loss. And it is one of poetry’s oldest forms.

Peter M. Sacks, in The English Elegy, writes that the elegy is a dynamic process, whereby the writer works through his or her grief. The aim of the elegy is for the writer and mourner “to draw attention, consolingly, to his own surviving powers.” If grief is a process by which the mourner integrates the loss into the meaning of life, the elegy is that process by which the hole and whole of what is lost is filled with language.

For Sacks, the elegy is “a channeling of the energy of grief into a highly controlled and skilled exertion.” How do we do this? Literature offers many examples of the elegiac form, but one that has been of interest to me lately, is Karen Green’s Bough Down. Green, an artist and writer who lost her husband, David Foster Wallace to suicide, wrote Bough Down, after her husband’s death.

I love David Foster Wallace, particularly the free play of philosophy blended with popular culture that can be seen in his best essays. I might not have discovered Green’s Bough Down had I not known it was an elegy for Wallace, but the elegy holds its own space, making meaning in its own distinctness, even as Green acknowledges that the process of loss allows her, if only for a moment—to inhabit the despair her husband may have experienced through his depression.

Green’s poetry book explores unresolved grief, and the complex infinities and contradictions that grief can contain. Prose poems juxtaposed beside artworks, like faded text, whited-out lines, cut up dollar bills, and silhouettes evoke erasure, recapture, and remaking.

Early in the poetry book, Green faces the reality of the loss.

She writes, “This morning you are nowhere.”

The horror of the beloved’s nowhereness is one of the great alienations of death. The absence of the beloved leads to a loss of the self in so far as the self identifies with the lost.

But, in order to face the reality of the loss, Green must learn to re-inhabit her body. She writes about the crisis therapist who was with her when she found her husband dead. The trauma therapist walks her through what she needs to do at the moment of trauma:

“Now try to feel. Can you feel your feet? Try to feel your feet on the floor.”

But Green doesn’t know if she can feel. The loss of the beloved is the loss of self. Death is the ultimate form of alienation:

“Can I feel the floor here, when there is a body out there, a body whose soul has made haste, a body who was my body to look at, at a time like this, a time of no time.”

These lines are reminiscent of the final scene in Shakespeare’s King Lear when Lear enters the stage holding the body of Cordelia, his grief beyond words, stripped to a bare “howl:”

Shakespeare writes: “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,/ And thou no breath at all?”

And indeed, in Green’s retelling, the most touching moments are when she describes the animals—her husband’s dogs facing the thing itself, the fact that cannot be named–the loss of the beloved. Their dumb apprehension becomes a kind of corollary to Green’s attempt to process the thing that cannot be apprehended. The dog’s reactions become a metaphor for the speaker’s reaction to grief—the desire to draw close; the desire to pull away:

 “One dog backed away, one ran up to kiss the face we loved.”

She tells the dog, “He’s not coming back. I feel like saying he died is letting him get away with something.”

How we choose to describe any loss shapes the loss. How we choose to tell the story of a loss shapes the story of our life after the loss—there’s the loss itself and then there is the storytelling about the loss. The story evolves with time. However, the story is not inconsequential. The story has the power to shape the life to come. Storytelling is not just narration or a recreation, it is the very process by which we invent a life out of the wreckage of life’s greatest devastations. This thought has kept me writing when I have lost faith. The fact that the story matters is a kind of faith.

And yet, the story may not have a clear plot; grief does not have a clear plot. Green notes, “The doctor says this is a non-linear, inelegant process.”

The process itself defies narration, defies the simple telling. And yet the irony is that if we do not tell it, if we do not find a way to re-create the loss, we will be doomed to live with the absence alone. Green’s speaker finds a way forward. But to move forward, she must honestly face her frustrated desire. If grief is desire frustrated, the work of the elegy is to face those losses and transform them into art. In one of the most breathtaking passages in the book, Green writes about what she wants:

“I want him pissed off at politicians, ill at ease, trying to manipulate me into doing favors for him I would do anyway. I want him looking for his glasses, trying not to come, doing the dumb verb of journaling, getting spinach caught between canine and gum, berating my logorrhea, or my not staying mum. I don’t want him at peace.”

She adds, much later in the poetry book, “There is the thing itself and then there is the predicament of its cavity.”

We live in a world and a time of great loss, but within these losses there is the potential for great transformation. The potential for transformation after grief turns grief into a question rather than a period or full stop. The answer is up to each person to give.

At the end, we are faced with the stark fact of the loss itself. We want our old lives back. They are not coming back. We can only create around the predicament.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

The work of all literature—fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—and all art, is to reveal the landscapes within and to help us blaze new directions without. In her latest memoir, Untamed, Glennon Doyle finds an unexpected new direction for her life, and writes about it in prose so simply crisp it crackles like frozen ice. Doyle, whose “skyrocketing writing career” was “based partly” on “traditional family and Christianity,” leaves behind that marriage and that version of Christianity and the success it brought her to marry soccer great, Abby Wambach. In her prior memoir, Love Warrior, Doyle writes about saving her marriage. Untamed takes the broken plot of Love Warrior, and transforms it into a breathtaking meditation on healing, freedom, and choice. In this book recommendation, I want to take a closer look at Untamed and why I think it’s a good read, especially now.

Doyle writes: “Hell hath no fury like a memoirist whose husband just fucked up her story.”

The subject of Untamed is the story of how Doyle forged a more authentic path forward, breaking free of social structures that kept her caged. She writes eloquently about the tension many women face—the struggle between making a choice to please other people and making a choice to please themselves; Doyle urges her readers to make choices to please themselves.

Untamed is the story of how Doyle left behind her marriage, turned away from a version of Christianity that no longer served her, transformed her family, and changed her narrative.

Untamed reminds me of Joan Didion’s essay, “On Self Respect,” where Didion explores similar themes of self-deception, public expectation, and authenticity.

In “On Self Respect,” Didion notes: “self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others” and “…self-deception remain the most difficult deception.” Those with self-respect “know the price of things.” They know their self-worth and value themselves enough to own their own decisions.

I not only admire Doyle’s incredible courage in choosing to live an authentic life and write about it, but I also find the book entertaining; it’s a lovely beach day read—whenever it is we’ll be able to lie on the beach (Doyle’s Untamed was released in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, and Doyle had to cancel her book tour).

That said, as a writer holed up at home, it’s fun to watch someone fall in love and to watch them transform through love.

Throughout the memoir, Doyle is relentless in her search for self-knowledge. The central question at the heart of the memoir is this: How do we remain true to our innermost truths, even when the world would have us choose otherwise, and, more importantly—how do we arrive at those innermost stories when the world would make us the protagonists of a different story?

Doyle writes beautifully about the first time she saw Abby, “the first time I wanted something beyond what I had been trained to want…Creating a life with her was the first original idea I’d ever had and the first decision I made as a free woman.”

In the process, Doyle reevaluates her faith, friendships, work, sexuality, and life. She asks herself: “How much of this was my idea?”

A woman doesn’t truly grow up in our society until she asks herself this question.

Doyle writes eloquently about the cages we build around ourselves—cages of ideal marriage, ideal friendship, ideal faith, ideal family, ideal appearance, ideal feelings—and then dismantles them.  

In one particularly beautiful passage, she explains: “I spent sixteen years with my head in a toilet trying to be light. I drank myself numb for a decade, trying to be pleasant. I’ve giggled at and slept with assholes, trying to be touchable. I’ve held my tongue so hard I’ve tasted blood, trying to be gentle. I’ve spent thousands on potions and poisons, trying to be youthful. I have denied myself for decades, trying to be pure.”

What if we stopped trying to be pure, and chose to be ourselves? What if we let ourselves rage against the dying of the light? What if we stopped brooking assholes, stopped trying to be pleasant, trying to be touchable? What if we looked within ourselves for the answers instead of searching for them on Google?

How do we find the answers within when we have been conditioned to search for the answers outside? Doyle explains that first, a person needs to be ruthlessly honest.

And, perhaps there are two types of truths—the truths we know and deny and the truths we do not know because we haven’t looked deep enough within ourselves to know them. We cannot get to the second, deeper truths until we face the truths we deny first.

She writes: “The culture depends on the sensitivity of a few, because nothing can be healed if it’s not sensed first.”

How to Change the Story

So, how is a woman to break out of the cages she has built for herself? How does a woman change her own narrative? Fortunately, Doyle offers some helpful tips. They include:

• Feel Everything: Doyle explains: “Consumer culture promises us that we can buy our way out of pain—that the reason we’re sad and angry is not that being human hurts; it’s because we don’t have those countertops, her thighs, these jeans. This is a clever way to run the economy, but it is no way to run a life. Consuming keeps us distracted, busy, and numb.” The solution is not to fear pain, but to embrace it. Pain passes, and its lessons teach us something.
• Be Still. Meditate. Doyle writes that knowledge arrives in the still place where we silence our minds; she calls it the “Knowing.” The thing about meditation is that the wisdom it brings doesn’t come all at once. “The Knowing never reveals a five-year plan.” Instead, the process is like this: do “the next precise thing, one thing at a time, without asking permission or offering explanation.” When moments of uncertainty arise, Doyle meditates. From my own experience, this is good advice.
• Imagination. Doyle urges her readers to stop “competing for a seat at their table” and instead urges her readers to build their own tables. The life that is the most beautiful is not ready made, and doesn’t fit into the frame that the culture creates, but is self-created. We have to imagine the most beautiful happy possible story of our lives and have the courage to try to make it real. “May our dreams become our plans.”

And throughout this process, Doyle reminds us that we are constantly losing. Pursuing your own path won’t protect you from pain and loss, but the beauty on the other side is worth the price.

Untamed is a story about the transformative power of love, how it can suddenly give us a new narrative; it’s a story about divorce, how it doesn’t have to break a family, but can remake a family; it’s a reminder of the many fallacies women have been forced to swallow and vomit back up, but Untamed reclaims these narratives and transforms them into something bright and hopeful.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Even as I find myself quarantined from so many things I love, including the natural world which brings so much solace, I find myself desperately trying to be productive. I know that I’ve giving myself a Sisyphean rock to roll up an Everest of the mind, but every morning, I wake up and set new tasks before me. I may not be able to go out and do the things I want, but I tell myself I still have agency, and damn it, I intend to use it.

It’s a new world, and my new tasks have included: write a new blog post every day, read a book a day, finish my poetry book, finally launch my blog (if anyone other than Sergio is reading this, it means I’ve finally succeeded).

And while it is likely that I’ll write as much as I hope to write, read as much as I hope to read, and finally finish that poetry book, I also find that these attempts to find a wormhole out of the present reality are no escape from the weight of pure dread that daily threatens to consume me. If I dare to turn on the news, I see that more people have died from Covid-19, more have lost their jobs, and if I dare to look further beyond the dreadful headlines, I read that, despite the fact that we’ve cut back on greenhouse emissions, the natural world is still hurtling desperately toward a cliff in which we might start to see mass die-offs of the planet’s species in the next 10 to 20 years.

So many promising mornings have devolved into lazy afternoons napping on the couch, afternoons spent binge-watching Netflix specials and Kitchen Nightmares on YouTube.

And so, that brings me to Kitchen Nightmares. Kitchen Nightmares, if you haven’t been introduced, is a show in which Chef Gordon Ramsay visits a bunch of restaurants on Long Island (and elsewhere in later seasons), in an attempt to bring the restaurants back from the brink of failure and closure. Eventually, the show devolves into a bunch of Long Islanders drinking and yelling at each other at the top of their lungs. Plates are shattered on the floor. Things get burned. Fire departments get called. Occasionally, Ramsay vomits.

Why watching Chef Gordon Ramsay bitch out a bunch of failing restaurant owners gives me comfort is a deep mystery of my psyche. Actually, there’s no mystery here. Chef Ramsay hails from a time before the pandemic, a time when restaurants still existed, a time when failing restaurants could change course and re-open. Watching happy customers gush over the perfect meatballs and crisp pizza brings me nostalgic joy and sorrow. I sometimes wonder how those restaurants are doing now. Yes, I know they are closed. But I wonder if they will re-open when this madness ends. If the news is any indication, they’re all gone and the show is a time capsule, a relic of a time forever lost.

The premise of each show is exactly the same. This is also comforting. In a world where I might wake up tomorrow and find that the global food supply chain has finally shut down and where workers in New York City are digging graves in Central Park, watching a show where the premise is exactly the same every day is comforting. The premise is this: Ramsay visits failing restaurants in an attempt to discover the reasons why the restaurants have failed.

Often he begins by asking the restaurant owners directly. Rarely do the owners say: we failed because our food tastes like shit, we failed because we serve freeze-dried dog food, we failed because we serve imitation crab and call it real crab, we failed because our service sucks and our décor is from the seventies, we failed because we yell at the customers, we failed because we have three managers, one of whom is a raging alcoholic and the other of whom is fucking the waitresses in the supply closet, we failed because all the food in our refrigerator is rotting and because the lobsters are cannibalizing each other in the tank. More often, owners will say, “we’re failing because we have no customers.” Ramsay is usually patient. “Why don’t you have customers?” he’ll ask calmly. The restaurant owners never know why. In the tank behind them, the lobsters are eating one another.

Ramsay can easily see why the restaurant is failing because most of the time, anyone with eyes and ears could see why the restaurant is failing. And yet, the show reveals something about our common humanity. While the reasons for our failures may be evident to everyone around us, they are seldom evident to us.

Fortunately, most of the time, after initially resisting Chef Ramsay’s help, the restaurant owners start to listen. They see how the shitty food, shitty management, shitty chef, or shitty décor is turning people away. They make the changes they need to make. People return. They make money again.

While the restaurants might be gone, Kitchen Nightmares has a lesson to teach us. As I watched the show unfold, I started to feel a nagging worry in the pit of my stomach. For years, haven’t I been wanting to finally publish a book of poetry?

What if I was the failing owner of the restaurant, sitting on a pile of frozen hamburgers, unable to see why I had no customers? Why haven’t I done it, yet—why haven’t I published the book? I have some guesses. But I worry that these guesses are much like the restaurant owners looking into their empty dining rooms, assuming that the reasons why their restaurant is failing is purely due to the lack of customers.

We need honest feedback from other people, who have a genuine intention to help us. This is why, we not only need to seek criticism, but when we get it, we need to listen.

Today, I’m going to take a different tactic. Today I’m going to reach out to my closest friends, those I trust to give me honest feedback, and I’m going to ask them why they think I’ve failed to publish my poetry book. And when my friends answer, this time, I’m going to listen. 

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

The formation of meaning is a constantly evolving process, and from time to time, over the course of a life, things change, and these changes require that we pause and make sense of the experience. As COVID-19 infects our cities and communities, many of us have had to pull back from the lives we formerly led. Others have had to face the prospect of possibly losing loved ones, of possibly becoming sick ourselves. It is undeniable that these defining moments will change us; how we face these changes will define us. Nonfiction books and memoir can help us observe a writer making meaning while also doing the difficult work of living. In this book recommendation, I’ll explore how Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air offers a roadmap for making meaning.

At various points in my life, particularly in moments of profound change, I find myself returning to Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air. It is one of the few books I have read more than a couple of times. When he was 36 years old, about to finish his medical residency in neurological surgery, Kalanithi received a devastating diagnosis: terminal lung cancer. And just like that, Kalanithi found himself transforming from doctor to patient, from promising neurosurgeon to a man in search of the questions that had set him on the path to begin with.

The questions he is forced to face next are the questions we all ultimately face. What is the meaning of life? Or, in the words of Mary Oliver, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” The answer for each of us is unique, shaped by our experiences in the world, by our goals, and by our values. Kalanithi reminds me, time and again, that I must not wait until the last minute to take stock, to pause, and to make sure that my values match my actions.

In this time of uncertainty, I find myself asking myself whether I am working on the projects I find most meaningful given life’s finitude. Am I working to build and nurture the relationships and love that makes life important? Am I giving of myself fully to each day, even if the day might itself be circumscribed by limits imposed by this pandemic?

Where does Kalanithi find meaning? In this nonfiction book, he finds it in literature, in his work as a neuroscientist, and in his relationships with other people.

“I studied literature and philosophy to understand what makes life meaningful, studied neuroscience and worked in an fMRI lab to understand how the brain could give rise to an organism capable of finding meaning in the world, and enriched my relationships with a circle of dear friends through various escapades.”

Kalanithi ultimately became a doctor to answer life’s most important question: “What makes human life meaningful?” He finds something of an answer in the marriage of literature and neuroscience. “…literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain.” In literature, Kalanithi finds “the richest material for moral reflection.”

And so, upon receiving his terminal diagnosis, Kalanithi turns to literature, choosing to spend his remaining time writing When Breath Becomes Air, a nonfiction book of such profound beauty it still takes my breath away, still leaves me weeping.

As Kalanithi navigates the ravages of terminal cancer, he finds meaning in his relationships. He reconnects with his wife, a relationship he describes as “deep in meaning, a shared and evolving vocabulary about what mattered.” In the midst of terminal illness, Kalanithi and his wife decide to have a child. His wife asks, “Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?” Kalanithi responds, “Wouldn’t it be great if it did?”

As a doctor, Kalanithi is forced to make split-second judgement calls that can mean the difference between life and death. He writes about twins delivered prematurely, who later die. The doctor chose to perform a C-section on the mother. Later, Kalanithi learns that the doctor had a choice: leave the babies in the womb, where they would likely die, or deliver them at 23 weeks—a few days short of viability. The doctor chose to deliver. Kalanithi asks the doctor, “Which is worse, being born too early or waiting too long to deliver?” The doctor explains that it is a judgement call. Up to that point, Kalanithi remarks, “In my life, had I never made a decision harder than choosing between a French dip and a Reuben?”

The judgement calls we make in life are often of the French dip and Reuben variety, but every so often, we are faced with choices so big, they are impossible to make. I believe the hardest choices in life are the ones most likely to get us stuck. Rather than making the hard choice, we so often choose to make no choice at all—which is itself the most dangerous choice we could make. Hard choices involve loss and tough decisions—leave the marriage or stay, quit the job or take the promotion, pursue the difficult, but passionate calling or choose the safe nine-to-five, move to the new city, say I love you. So often, we choose not to choose, and life chooses for us, not always in our best interests.

And even when we are making choices of the Reuben and French dip variety, we should do so always with the keen awareness that the sum total of those mundane choices eventually add up to form a life.

But how do we make choices, especially the tough ones? Kalanithi notes: “would knowledge alone be enough…? Surely intelligence wasn’t enough; moral clarity was needed as well.”

How do we make decisions with moral clarity? How do we approach life’s judgement calls with the resources to make a wise decision?

The answers we each give will be as unique as the lives we form in response. Some nonfiction books, however, can offer us a road map for living. Kalanithi’s book does just that.

Kalanithi’s search for authenticity is uncompromising. “Doctors in highly charged fields met patients at inflected moments, the most authentic moments, where life and identity were under threat; their duty included learning what made that particular patient’s life worth living, and planning to save those things if possible—or to allow the peace of death if not.”

The peace of death if not.

We live in the midst of a pandemic where doctors, right now, are being forced to make life or death decisions. Many of us are concerned for older loved ones, and for those with illness who may be vulnerable to this disease, whose course for some is so cruel.

Right now, socially distancing ourselves from one another is the best option we have as a society to save lives and stop the spread of disease. But, at some point, in the near future, we will need to ask ourselves what kind of society we want to build, what kind of world we’ll want to re-build, and more immediately, what kind of lives we want to live in the aftermath. It means defining our ongoing values as individuals and as a society. Fortunately, we can start to think about these things now. Life doesn’t stop in quarantine. We can sit and meditate on how we want to live our lives, to acknowledge that our answers will be imperfect. As a neurosurgeon facing life or death choices on the daily basis, Kalanithi knew this well: “The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgement will slip, and yet still struggle to win… You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”

“…each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth… Human knowledge… grows from the relationships we create…”

Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

I think about nature, the power of waves crashing against rocky cliffs, the vulnerability of a bird bowing before a bowl of water, and the powerful wind that those wings make when they fly. I think about the importance and significance of full moons, clear oceans, mountains shrouded in clouds, and quiet woods. I think about the sound of clear streams, a tern flying over the sea, and the glimpse of a turtle coming up to breathe.  

In the wake of tragedy and change, there is always a gap, a clearing, space made in a newly burnt forest after the fire. The old wood is gone. But there might be room to build a house, to plant a garden.

Kalanithi writes that he was searching in literature “for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death.” And through literature, he is “brought back to life.”

Through literature we are offered a glimpse of other perspectives. This is its gift. Kalanithi writes: “…each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth… Human knowledge… grows from the relationships we create…”

We are each tasked with this challenge: to find the vocabulary not only to make sense of our dying, but also our living. We must do the work, the sacred work of finding our way through life, of making up the meaning as we go.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.