Considering Lilies with Suleika Jaouad

Suleika Jaouad is a writer, artist, and advocate. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Between Two Kingdoms and the Emmy Award-winning New York Times column and video series “Life, Interrupted.” Her essays and reported features have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Vogue, among others. Her weekly newsletter, the Isolation Journals, was founded at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic to help people transform life’s interruptions into creative grist and community. Along with her husband, the musician Jon Batiste, she is the subject of the Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary, American Symphony, which is a portrait of two artists during a year of extreme highs and lows and a meditation on art, love, and the creative process. A vocal advocate for prison and healthcare reform, she has served on Barack Obama’s Presidential Cancer Panel and was the recipient of the inaugural Inspire Award from NMDP (formerly Be the Match) for her work to expand and diversify the national bone marrow registry. To receive her free weekly newsletter, subscribe here. To learn more about becoming a bone marrow donor, join the symphony.

Consider the Lilies

I was always a striver, it seems, and in my younger years, I wore it as a badge of pride—something I now recall with more than a little embarrassment. At age 12, I announced to my mom it was my last year to be “precocious,” and it was time to get serious. I threw myself into things full force, whether it was ballet or the double bass or writing novellas on yellow legal pads. As the child of immigrants, I knew the sacrifices that had paved the way for me, especially those of my dad, whose parents could not read or write, who was the only one of their eight children to leave his homeland of Tunisia. It felt important to honor those sacrifices by making something of myself.

So I earned a full-ride to Princeton, where I proceeded to work myself to the bone. I was furiously motivated by a fear of failure and also what I now recognize as a serious case of imposter syndrome. It proved an effective strategy. I graduated with honors while holding down two jobs. For my next step, I imagined an impressive career as a foreign correspondent, reporting on international conflicts like the Arab Spring.

I never got my foot in the door of a newsroom, though—at least, not as a war reporter. A year after graduation, I learned that I had acute myeloid leukemia, which came with a 35-percent chance of long-term survival. I was only 22, and I couldn’t wrap my head around what that meant. I couldn’t possibly have cancer—I had plans. But you know what they say about plans: humans make them and God laughs. Overnight, I became patient number 5624, and I spent the next four years in cancer treatment.

At the beginning, I felt so much despair, as if my life was over before it had begun. But about a year in, at the suggestion of a college friend, my family and I embarked upon a 100-day project, where we all did one creative act every day for 100 days. My dad wrote stories of his childhood in Tunisia. My mom, a visual artist, made one ceramic tile every day, which she assembled into a shield to hang above my bed like a protective talisman. I chose the practice that had always brought me comfort: keeping a journal.

With no expectations of an outcome, no pressure of productivity, I felt liberated, free to follow my curiosity. Writing became a portal to make meaning of my circumstances and grapple with my mortality. On the page, I came to see how illness rerouted my priorities away from the constant striving to what really matters—to time with family and friends, to the quotidian joys of everyday living, to the power of a creative practice. It even unexpectedly led to my first break as a journalist, writing a New York Times column called “Life, Interrupted” about cancer in young adulthood. Therein was another lesson: the best-laid plans often do go awry, sometimes for the better.

I thought those lessons would stay with me. But the truth is that as I emerged from treatment, as I got stronger and healthier, I slipped back into old habits. American society is obsessed with hustle and productivity and consumption; our worth is measured by outward markers of success, like how much money we make and our résumé accolades. That productivity machine makes its own gravity, and I got pulled back in. Years passed. Each moment was a stepping stone to the next, instead of its own exquisite gem.

Then two years ago, after nearly a decade in remission, I found out that my leukemia had returned, and I would have to reenter treatment and undergo a second bone marrow transplant. It was devastating to watch the life I’d rebuilt collapse, to have my future plans replaced by fear and uncertainty. My prognosis was worse this second time around, and grappling with my reality so directly felt terrifying. On top of that, I was soon put on a cocktail of medications that blurred my vision, making it a struggle to write, which had always been my coping mechanism.

So I had to reimagine what was possible and what would see me through, and what I chose this time was watercolors. On my first night in the bone marrow transplant unit, I began painting my literal fever dreams: me in a hospital bed perched in a tree overlooking New York City, me receiving a blood transfusion with a giraffe as my IV pole, me swimming in cobalt waters surrounded by narwhals and other sea creatures. Not only was I able to access a kind of childlike wonder—a mixture of intrigue and curiosity and delight—but painting with watercolors taught me about surrender. Watercolors have a mind of their own. You can’t make a rigid plan or strive for perfection. You have to let go and rejoice in the happy accidents.

I’m currently cancer-free, but I’ll never be considered cured—I’ll be in treatment for the rest of my life. In circumstances like mine, people often advise you to live each day as if it’s your last. It’s the old carpe diem ethos, one that dovetails so neatly with the American idea of striving: Pack in as much in as you can, wring as much as possible from every moment. But it feels so pressurized to think that way, and chaotic too. If we literally lived each day as if it were our last, we’d all be draining our bank accounts to go on wild bucket-list adventures—and maybe robbing the bank while we were at it. So rather than living every day as if it’s my last, I’ve shifted to a gentler approach of living every day as if it’s my first. I want to wake up and meet the day with the wonder of a newborn, to cultivate childlike qualities like curiosity and play.

Thinking this way has created another shift—from a sense of scarcity to abundance. You might be familiar with the passage from the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus says, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They don't toil, neither do they spin.” He goes on to tell his followers not to worry about tomorrow—not about what they will eat or drink or what clothes they will wear, for God will take care of them.