TOW #12: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

            When I was finished with Carson’s Silent Spring, I felt drawn towards a nonfiction book with more of a storyline rather than the previous book’s evidence-driven layout. After surfing on the almighty Google search-engine, I encountered a book that had recently released in January of this year. In short, Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air is a memoir focused around his diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer. At the young age of thirty-six with his ten years of neurosurgeon training almost at its completion and his wife pregnant with their first child, Kalanithi describes his journey of transitioning from a doctor to a patient holding onto his last breath. The book is divided into two chapters which symbolizes the “before and after” of his life after learning about his diagnosis. Although I’ve read only the first half of this memoir, I am completely absorbed in the story.

            Throughout Kalanithi’s recount of his personal life and events, he interweaves life lessons that he had learned from his experience in the medical field as a neurosurgeon. One lesson that had the greatest lasting impact on me was to follow my path. Although he had been meaning to pursue a career in literature in the future, Kalanithi decided to stray away from his undergraduate degree in literature at Stanford and graduate degree in philosophy at Cambridge to answer his “calling” in medicine. This was when he was studying the work of Walt Whitman for his thesis. After this assignment, Kalanithi realized that he was becoming “increasingly certain that [he] had little desire to continue in literary studies, whose main preoccupations had begun to strike [him] as overly political and averse to science” (40). Because of this sudden revelation, he became aware that “[he] didn’t quite fit in an English Department” (41). Although his decision meant that he had to set aside literature, he was satisfied with the idea that it would “allow [him] a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay” (42).

            Kalanithi’s late response to his true passion encouraged me to believe that my own “calling” will not arrive according to my will. This idea relieved me as I came to realize that I had been stressing about my impending future and my potential career. Instead of unnecessarily preoccupying my time into forging a “perfect” future, I decided to just let my curiosity lead me to wherever it may wish.