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Are you living your best life now?
Not always? This is a podcast for you.
Duke Professor Kate Bowler is an expert in the stories we tell about success and failure, suffering and happiness. She had Stage IV cancer. Then she didn’t. And since then, all she wants to do is talk to funny and wise people about how to live with the knowledge that, well, everything happens.
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Run Toward the Danger
Do you ever look back at your childhood and go… certainly that didn’t happen like that? Where were the adults? Academy Award winning director and childhood actress Sarah Polley describes what it was like to not be believed when she was afraid or when she wanted to stop or when she was in pain or when she was in danger. And how, as adults, we can all better protect those around us and learn to look back on our younger selves with compassion.
When Life Gives You Lemons
Today, we’re talking about tragicomedy. And isn’t that all of life? The absurdity. The horror. The laughter that somehow cuts through the most difficult of moments. Our guest today, Stephanie Wittles Wachs wrote a beautiful memoir called Everything is Horrible and Wonderful about the death of her brother to an accidental heroin overdose when he was 30 years old.
Made to Belong
A basketball coach, a doctor, and a history professor walk into a bar…. This might be the start of a great joke OR the start of an episode of Everything Happens.
These Beautiful, Terrible Days
We are kicking off Season 12 of the Everything Happens Podcast (!!) with a little bonus situation because we’re having a little bonus moment. Kate’s new book HAVE A BEAUTIFUL, TERRIBLE DAY! Is available everywhere books are sold today. It is a book of daily meditations meant to ground whatever day you’re having—all of the ups and downs and inbetweens. And who better to talk about that with than my friend, Bob Crawford. Bob is the bass player for the wildly popular band The Avett Brothers, and someone who knows too well how terrible and beautiful life can be.
Becoming Enchanted
Living in uncertainty can lead to a sense of languishing. How do we wake up from this feeling? Katherine May has written gorgeous books like Wintering and Enchantment that help us better understand how to live wide-awake to the world around us.
Everything Can Be True at Once
Bozoma Saint John is a successful marketing executive, but she is also a woman who knows the rollercoaster of profound love and deep loss. She shares her hard-won wisdom and complicated grief as she faced her husband’s terminal cancer diagnosis.
Laughter is the Best Medicine
Comedian Iliza Shlesinger is refreshingly candid, especially about things many women can relate to, like the sheer exhaustion that comes from juggling life’s demands (dare we say, it’s like a badge of honor?), pregnancy loss—a topic that often remains in the shadows, and how our accounts of self-care really go off the rails when bubble baths become the solution to all of life’s problems.
Love That Carries Us
How do you think about faith and hope when your prayers aren’t answered? What about when they are? Rivs and Steph have the kind of story you might see in a blockbuster movie. Rivs was a professional endurance athlete who was suddenly put on life support with a mysterious lung disease. But then a confluence of shocking events occured to get him the care he needs to survive. His wife, Steph, grew up as part of the Church of Latter Day Saints, a faith that believed that if she prayed hard enough, miracles would happen. But then her dad died…
Serious About Fun
Don’t Waste Your Life. Savor Every Moment. Live in the Present. Culture has a lot of prescriptions for how to live a good life. But what if we don’t know where to start? Writer and researcher Catherine Price started to notice how much time she was spending on her phone and how the habit was sucking joy from her life. Instead, she wanted to learn how to have fun again. What is fun? How do you have it? Can you become a more fun person? Catherine debunks the myths around what it means to have fun—especially when we think we’re…
The Art of Noticing
Margaret Renkl calls herself a backyard naturalist—but not because she has any particular expertise. From the birds in her yard to the bugs in her flower beds, she has learned the art of attention. Nature has taught her a speed at which to live, to hope, to stave off despair.
How to Really Know Someone
We may think we understand people. Where they are coming from. Why they act the way they act. … But what if we’re wrong? New York Times columnist David Brooks’ family motto was “Think Yiddish, Act British.” He knew how to keep a tight lid on his emotions, which could be useful… until he realized that he would need to learn a lot more about the role of empathy to love the people around him. Now, he’s sharing the result of his curiousity on how we might get better at really knowing people. Perhaps that simple skill can help combat…
The Rituals of Grief
So many of us have experienced a before… and an after. The lovely writer Clover Stroud had her before and after at a young age. When she was 16, her mom was in a horse-riding accident that left her severely disabled until she died… 22 years later. The suddenness of that accident layered with the ongoingness of that level of caregiving bonded Clover and her big sister, Nell in remarkable ways. Then, Nell unexpectedly died.
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