Modern-Day Psalmist Kate Bowler’s Best Tips to Keep a Soft Heart (and Your Sanity!) During These Crazy Times

This week, most of us will likely have what we consider to be a bad day—one where we’re filled with anxiety or anger, or we have an icky interaction with a loved one, co-worker, or neighbor.

Kate Bowler gets it. She’s had her fair share of terrible days. But the religious history professor at Duke University and four-time New York Times bestselling author is on a mission to help us see that our bad days—the ones filled with ugly truths and more downs than ups—are also filled with beautiful moments. And allowing the truth of what’s happening to emerge rather than following our cultural script to “look on the bright side” is actually a gift.

“If we can be really honest with what the day brings—whatever politically, emotionally, structurally is coming our way—then we can be aware of the kind of courage it will require to meet that challenge,” Bowler tells The Sunday Paper. “And we’re going to need a lot of courage to bring our communities back together, to find solutions that work for everyone, and to stay the kinds of people we need to be in the meantime. We’re going need to be courageous and kind.”

The Sunday Paper sat down with Bowler to ask her how she makes room for the beautiful and the terrible side by side. Her insights will inspire all of us to be more emotionally flexible during a time when we need that most—and help us chart a path forward from a place of connection and a belief in the good in humanity.

A CONVERSATION WITH KATE BOWLER

What does having a soft heart mean, and why is it so important in this moment in time?

I think so many of us would like to identify as being soft hearted, but we worry that it’s a liability right now. Shouldn’t we toughen ourselves up? Shouldn’t we get battle ready for a world that doesn’t equate tender heartedness with bravery, survival, or meeting reality head on?

But I think tender heartedness is the ability to stay not just broken, but broken open to the world around us.

There’s so much pain that just breaks us. That’s the truth. There’s so much fear, too, and there are very good reasons to feel scared and overwhelmed right now. But I believe soft heartedness is one of the only ways that we can move forward. The alternatives are likely too heavy to bear.

Because here’s what we all want: We want the structures of our lives to hold. We want democracy to create meaningful power in the hands of the people. We want health care, and justice in the courts, and fair reporting in the news. We want such basic things! And when we start to worry that fragility is going to mean our emotional, spiritual, and democratic house is going to fall in on us, we worry that being soft hearted is just for the naive.

So, the other candidate wins. Laws are changed that you’re terrified about. There’s hard work that’s going to have to get done one way or the other. But we’re going to need our big, dumb hearts to stay open to the possibilities we have in our families, in our communities, and in our nation.

What are some of the signs that our hearts aren’t as soft as they could be?

One way I notice this in myself is when frustration with other people’s opinions starts to harden into contempt. At what point am I starting to assume that I know everybody else’s reasons and sources and opinion, and that it is irredeemably dumb? Scorn is a red flag.

We can disagree, we can disapprove, we can even be frustrated, but once we start moving into scorn and contempt, that is a sign that we’re failing to see the heart of other people’s reasoning.

Sure, we can we fault them for their sources, or their decision tree, but people’s motivations are typically coming from a desire to protect themselves, a desire to understand—those universal responses are what we need to excavate ourselves to.

How can we stay connected to others right now, even when it feels tricky because we disagree with them?

I find when I get very frustrated or I’m feeling the weight of the distance between me and another person, so much of my energy floods to my head instead of my heart. A lovely trick when you’re talking to someone you disagree with is to pretend you’re both 10 years old. Remember them again as the young person who’s having a conversation with your younger self who’s really hoping for things.

Another thing I do—especially if I’m really frustrated and maybe even scared by other people’s opinions—is to try to identify one part of who they are that can see the world more clearly than I can. Everybody will have one little tool in their Swiss Army knife that is probably better than mine. For example, I love interdependence. I love community. I believe all solutions are communal. If I’m talking to somebody who’s a hardcore, rugged, independent who just wants to do everything on their own, I try to pause for a moment and think about their resourcefulness. I might think, Oh my gosh, they would be able to rebuild a world where I don’t know how to use the microwave.

This can help me get back to a place where I realize that a gentler approach can help get me back to a place of curiosity. And once we’re back into curiosity, then we can rediscover if not love, then some appreciation for each other again.

Your book, Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day!, points to the truth that we can have days that are filled with “both/and”—anger and anxiety and beauty and wonder. How is this possible?

Our cultural scripts urge us to try to say only one, unambiguous thing about every day: Everything is wonderful! We’re supposed to Calvin Hobbs-style transmogrify every difficult emotion into something else. What ends up being missing in that equation is the honesty we need to admit, acknowledge, and settle into the truth of what’s ahead of us.

Any good thing has to start with honesty. Any need for repair—frankly, every work of justice has to begin with honesty. So, let’s not just skip straight to, “I have to make something amazing out of this.” But rather, let’s start with the anger and the fear and the frustration and the bitterness—let’s make space for the ugly stuff. Because the ugly stuff is telling us the truth, too. We just don’t like it.

And let’s try to look at the worst parts of humanity in ourselves and say, “Of course that would happen.” That is a part of who we are. More honesty about the terrible opens us up to then be able to see the spaces in between, which is the strange, surreal beauty of the natural world; the unusual softness of your kid’s earlobe; the wonder of somebody else doing something incredibly heroic; watching poll workers be kind to every person that comes their way!

You start to then see the beautiful stuff not as something you’re trying to muscle your way into, but as the kind of miracle that it is.

I think if we can have more room for the beautiful and the terrible side by side—as opposed to having to ask one to absorb the other—we’ve opened ourselves up to an emotional flexibility that gets us back to a place of humanity.

It sounds like you’re speaking to the importance of really feeling our feelings this week, even the uncomfortable ones …

Yes!  We’re socialized into aggressive, “bright siding” that prevents us from accessing difficult emotions when we need them. For example, we need to know when to be angry, because that’s how we decide that something’s unacceptable and make a change.

Our cultural preference is to trust that “the sun will come out tomorrow” and to “look on the bright side” and we force people to do that in the middle of the worst day of our lives. Yet allowing the truth of what’s happening to emerge is a gift.

Kate Bowler is the three-time New York Times bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason, No Cure for Being Human, Good Enough, The Lives We Actually Have, Blessed, and The Preacher's Wife and hosts the popular podcast Everything Happens. A Duke University professor, she earned a master's of religion from Yale Divinity School and a PhD at Duke University.