Book: When breath becomes air

This is a book written by the former neurosurgery chief resident at Stanford, Paul Kalanithi. It's a memoir of his career, his illness, and even his death. He was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer when he was in his last year of the residency program, right before he can enjoy his hard won and carefully planned future that includes having his own lab for research, practice and teach in a prestigious school and finally more family time without the squeezing schedule from residency program. But why does the cancer happen? Why does it happen right before he achieve his goal? do we have an answer for it? Does the answer matter? Even we have an answer to explain it, can we still change the fate?

One thing he mentioned really trigger my thoughts is about his return to the values of Christianity after being an ironclad atheism. We always want to manage things, control the life and predict the future. But when you get older and you look backward of your life, do you still feel your life is really under your control and prediction? Paul mentioned in this book:

scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity.....it makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique, subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering...

If life couldn't be promised under our prediction, and death is our destination, what attitude should we have with our life? Spirituality teach us to flow through with life. Some old proverb " Don't think too much, the universe has its own plan." But what if the universe's own plan is too different from ours, can we protest and change it?

I wonder if people are really afraid of death? No one can describe how does the death feel like, so the fear people have might not be about the death, but the loss of the control over their life and the unpredicted future they don't know where they are brought to. As a human being, we suffer when we feel we have no control of our life. We suffer when we are forced to sail to an unknown place out of our curiosity. It seems that all of our life is dealing with the fear, and facing the death is the ultimate challenge (like in the video game, you beat the final crazy monster and you win). But in the reality, there is no winning. It is just an ending and the way we judge ourselves is if we can face it with grace.