One Life by Jonathan Anthony Burkett is coming soon. Here is the first chapter, free.
We are given one life. Not a rehearsal, not a draft we can tear up and start again. One.
You already know that. You have known it since the first time someone you loved did not wake up, or the first time a door closed and stayed closed. But knowing something and feeling it are two different things. Most days we move through our hours as if there is an endless supply of them. Then something happens, a phone call, a test result, a birthday that lands harder than expected, and the truth sits down next to us and refuses to leave. This is it. This is the one we get.
That truth can feel like a threat. It can also feel like an invitation. This book is written for the space between those two feelings.
There is a strange thing that happens to many of us around the middle of life, though it can happen at nineteen or at seventy. We look up and realize we have been waiting. Waiting for the real part to begin. Waiting until the bills are paid, until the kids are grown, until we lose the weight, until we finally feel ready. We have been treating our days like a dress rehearsal for some better version of life that is coming later.
But there is no later version. The life you are living right now, with its unpaid bills and its unfinished business and its tired mornings, is the real one. The kitchen you are standing in is the real kitchen. The people around you are the real people. The heart beating in your chest is not warming up for something else.
I do not say that to frighten you. I say it because I think so many of us are exhausted by a life we keep postponing. We carry the weight of the present and the weight of an imagined future at the same time, and that is too much for anyone.
Think of a man named Quentin. He is fifty-two and works the overnight shift at a distribution warehouse outside of Memphis, loading trucks under lights that buzz like insects. For twenty years he told himself the warehouse was temporary. He was going to open a barbecue place. He had the recipes written in a spiral notebook in his glove box, the pages soft from being turned. He had a name picked out. He just needed the right time.
One night on his break, sitting on an overturned crate, he did the math on his phone. Twenty years. He had spent twenty years waiting for the right time, and the right time had never once knocked. He did not feel angry. He felt something worse. He felt like he had been holding his breath for two decades.
Quentin did not quit his job that night. He was not foolish. But the next Saturday he set up a smoker in his cousin’s church parking lot and sold plates after the second service. He sold out in ninety minutes. He went home and slept better than he had in years, not because he had made money, but because for the first time in a long time he had stopped rehearsing and started living.
That is what this chapter is about, and in many ways what this whole book is about. Not grand reinvention. Just the decision to stop holding our breath.
Somewhere along the way, most of us discover that this one life is heavier than anyone warned us.
When we are young, the adults around us tend to hide the weight. They want us to have a childhood, and that is a kindness. But it means many of us walk into adulthood unprepared for how much there is to carry. Nobody tells you that grief can show up years after a loss, triggered by a smell or a song in a grocery store. Nobody tells you that you can love someone and still feel lonely next to them. Nobody tells you that the people who hurt you most will often be the ones who were supposed to protect you.
There is pain that arrives without asking and refuses to leave. There is the pain of the world, the injustice we see on the news and in our own neighborhoods. There is the pain of our bodies, which do not always do what we ask. There is the pain of our own choices, the things we said and did that we would give a great deal to take back.
And there are the questions. We carry them for years without answers. Why does it hurt this much? Why does it seem to hurt some of us more? Why did that happen to her and not to me, or to me and not to him? Is anyone actually listening, up there or down here?
Part of what makes life heavy is that we try to carry it as if it were light. We smile at work. We say “fine” when someone asks how we are. We scroll past other people’s highlight reels and assume we are the only ones struggling. That pretending takes energy, a great deal of it, and it adds its own weight on top of everything else.
Another part of the heaviness is that we were never taught how to carry anything. We were taught how to read and how to count, how to fill out a job application and how to drive a car. But very few of us were taught what to do with grief, how to forgive, how to apologize, how to stay soft in a hard world. We are handed a heavy load and no instructions for lifting it. So we lift with our backs instead of our legs, so to speak, and we get hurt.
There is no shame in finding life heavy. If it feels heavy to you, that does not mean you are weak or doing something wrong. It means you are paying attention.
A woman I’ll call Amara works as a nurse on a cardiac floor in Houston. Her parents came to this country from Nigeria when she was four, and she grew up translating for them at the bank and the doctor’s office, learning early that she was the one who held things together. She is good at it. Her patients love her. Her coworkers call her when they cannot figure something out.
What none of them know is that Amara cries in her car most mornings before she walks into the hospital. Not dramatic crying. Just a few quiet minutes with her forehead on the steering wheel while the parking garage fills up around her. Her mother has been sick for two years. Her marriage is going through a long, gray stretch where nobody is fighting but nobody is really talking either. Her teenage son has gone quiet in a way that scares her.
For a long time Amara believed she was uniquely bad at handling life. Everyone else seemed to manage. She saw the other nurses laughing at the station and assumed they went home to easy evenings.
Then one morning a younger nurse named Abigail knocked on her car window. Abigail had seen her there before. She did not say anything wise. She just said, “Me too,” and climbed into the passenger seat, and the two of them sat there for five minutes without talking. Amara later said it was the most comforting five minutes of her year.
That is one of the first things I want you to know as you begin this book. Whatever you are carrying, you are not the only one carrying something like it. The details are yours. The weight is shared by more people than you would ever guess. So many of us are crying in parking garages. So many of us are smiling over a frightened heart. You are in good company, even when it does not feel that way.
This book is a conversation.
Think of it as the kind of conversation you might have at two in the morning with someone who has lived long enough to stop lying about how hard things are. Someone who is not trying to impress you or sell you anything. Someone who will sit at the kitchen table with you, coffee going cold, and talk honestly about the things most people avoid.
We are going to talk about a lot of hard things. Racism, and what it does to the people who suffer it and the people who practice it. Jealousy, and how it steals our joy. Whether life is fair, and what to do when it is not. Broken promises from parents, partners, friends and leaders.
We will talk about the debts we owe: to the parents and grandparents who sacrificed for us, to the village of people who raised us, and to the people we have hurt along the way. We will talk about how to apologize, and how to pay forward what we can never pay back.
We will talk about our bodies and minds, about illness and self-image, about the mind games we play with the people we love, about failure, and about the lies we live to keep the peace. We will talk about faith, about what happens when it breaks, and about whether it can grow back.
We will talk about why so many of us are afraid of love. About vulnerability, boundaries, forgiveness, empathy, and learning to be proud of who we are. We will look at peace and power on a world scale and in our own homes. We will spend time with history, including the ancient city of Ile-Ife, and see what an old cradle of civilization can teach us about who we are.
And then, near the end, we will talk about growth. About self-awareness, resilience, courage, gratitude, time, rest and habits. About how, even with everything that weighs us down, a person can grow a better heart, a better soul, a better mind and a better spirit.
Throughout the book you will meet people. They are composites, invented to stand in for the many real people who live lives like theirs. Their names are made up and their details are drawn from ordinary life: kitchens, job sites, hospital waiting rooms, church parking lots. They are not case studies. They are mirrors. My hope is that you will see a little of yourself in some of them, and a little of the people you love in others.
It is just as important to say what this book is not.
This book is not a set of easy answers. It does not pretend that every pain has a lesson attached to it, or that everything happens for a reason you will understand by the final page. Some things will never make sense. Some losses will never feel fair. I will not insult you by pretending otherwise.
This book is not a lecture. I am not standing at a pulpit or a podium looking down at you. I am sitting across from you, and I have carried weight of my own. When I talk about the people we have hurt, I am including myself. When I talk about fear of love, I am not speaking from some place above it.
This book is not a replacement for help. If you are struggling with your health, see a doctor. If you are struggling with your mind, with depression, anxiety, grief that will not lift, or thoughts that frighten you, please talk to a counselor, a therapist, a pastor, or someone trained to walk with you. A book can keep you company. It can give you words for what you feel. But it cannot sit with you in a room and hear your voice, and sometimes that is exactly what a person needs. Reaching out for help is not a failure of faith or strength. It is often the bravest thing a person does.
And this book is not about telling you what to believe. I will talk about God, about prayer, about spirit, because those things matter to me and to so many of the people I have known. But your faith, or your lack of it, or your questions about it, belong to you. You are welcome here whether you pray every morning, have not prayed in twenty years, or have never prayed at all.
You can read this book straight through, from the first page to the last. It is arranged in seven parts, and they build on each other. The early chapters name the weight. The middle chapters look at what that weight does to our bodies, our faith and our relationships. The later chapters turn toward growth.
But you do not have to read it that way. If you are in the middle of a fresh heartbreak, you may want to turn straight to the chapters on love and forgiveness. If you are sitting with a diagnosis, the chapters on the body may be what you need first. If you are angry at a leader or an institution that let you down, start there. The book will still be waiting when you come back to the beginning.
A few suggestions, if you want them.
First, read slowly. These are not chapters to rush through on the way to finishing a book. If a paragraph stops you, let it. Put the book down. Look out the window. Some of the most important things you will learn from these pages will not be written on them. They will come up from inside you while you are sitting quietly afterward.
Second, keep something to write with nearby. A cheap notebook is fine. The back of an envelope is fine. Each chapter ends with three reflection questions. They are not tests. Nobody is grading you. They are there to help you turn the chapter toward your own life. You might answer them in a sentence. You might fill five pages. You might skip them and come back months later.
Third, consider reading with someone. A friend, a spouse, a small group at church, a book club, a sister who lives across the country and talks to you on the phone on Sunday nights. Some of what we talk about here is easier to face when someone else is facing it beside you. Talking about a chapter out loud can open things that reading alone does not.
Fourth, be gentle with yourself. Some chapters will hit a nerve. You may feel defensive, or sad, or angry, or ashamed. That is normal. It does not mean the book is right about everything, and it does not mean you are wrong about everything. It means something in you is paying attention. Take a break if you need one. Take a walk. Call someone. Come back when you are ready.
And finally, if something in these pages brings up more than you can handle on your own, please reach out to a professional, a pastor, or someone you trust. Do not try to white-knuckle your way through it alone.
Picture a woman named Quiana. She is twenty-three, a college senior in Atlanta studying accounting, and she works twenty hours a week at a pharmacy to cover what her scholarship does not. Her grandmother raised her. Her grandmother died in the spring, three weeks before Quiana’s final exams, and Quiana sat those exams in a fog and passed them, barely.
It is October now. Everyone around her seems to think she should be over it. Her friends have stopped asking. Her professors never knew. At night in her apartment she sits at the little table her grandmother gave her when she moved out, the one with a burn mark from a hot pan in the corner, and she feels like she is carrying something that has no name.
If Quiana picked up a book like this one, I would not want it to tell her that her grandmother was in a better place, or that time heals all wounds, or that she should be grateful for the years she had. Those things might be true, or partly true, but they are not what she needs at that table at eleven at night.
What I would want is for the book to say: this is heavy, and you are not wrong to feel it. Here is what this kind of pain tends to do. Here are some people who carried something like it. Here is a question you might ask yourself. Here is one small thing you could try this week. And you are not alone.
That is the spirit I hope you find on every page. Not a voice telling you how to feel. A voice keeping you company while you feel it.
Since faith comes up often in this book, I want to say a little more about how I will handle it.
Many of us were raised with faith, in a church, a mosque, a temple, a synagogue, or simply a grandmother’s kitchen where prayer was as ordinary as breakfast. Some of us still hold that faith close. Some of us let it go, or had it torn from us by hard experiences or by people who misused it. Some of us are somewhere in between, unsure but still listening.
I believe faith matters. I believe there is something bigger than our struggles, and I have found strength in prayer and in scripture. But I also believe that a faith worth having can survive hard questions. It does not need to be protected from honesty. In this book we will ask hard questions about God, about suffering, about why good people hurt. We will not rush past those questions to tidy answers.
When I quote scripture, it will be short, and it will be offered the way you might offer a friend a cup of water, not the way you might throw a rock. One verse has stayed with me through many difficult seasons. It comes from the book of Psalms: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” I do not read that as a promise that the night will be short. Some nights last for years. I read it as a promise that the night is not the end of the story.
If that verse means something to you, hold onto it. If it does not, that is all right too. You can still walk with us through these pages.
There is a man named Abe who lives in a small brick house in a suburb of Cleveland. He is seventy-eight. He was a high school history teacher for thirty-six years, and he still corrects people’s dates at dinner parties, which his late wife used to tease him about. She died four years ago. They were married for fifty-one years.
Abe sits on his porch most evenings when the weather allows. Neighborhood kids wave at him on their bikes. A young couple who moved in across the street a few years back sometimes bring him leftovers. He has two grown children who live far away and call on Sundays.
When people ask Abe how he is doing, he usually says, “Still here.” It is a joke, but it is also the truest thing he knows. He has buried his parents, his wife, his brother, and more friends than he can count. He has made mistakes he still thinks about at night, including a long silence with his son that took years to repair. He has watched the world change in ways that thrill him and ways that frighten him.
If you asked Abe what he has learned, he would probably shrug and say he is still learning. But if you sat long enough on that porch, he might tell you this: “I spent too many years thinking I’d get around to the important things. Calling my brother. Telling my son I was wrong. Taking my wife to see the ocean in Maine like she always wanted. Some of those I got to. Some I didn’t. The ones I didn’t, I think about every day.”
Then he might add, “But I’m still here. So I’m still getting around to things.”
Abe’s life is not a tragedy and it is not a fairy tale. It is a life. It has weight and it has joy. It has regrets and it has repairs. And in the evenings, on his porch, there is a quiet kind of peace that came not from avoiding pain but from walking through it and staying open on the other side.
I hope that by the end of this book you will have a little more of what Abe has. Not because your pain will be gone, but because you will know you can carry it and still live.
Before you go on to the next chapter, here are a few small things you might try. None of them will change your life overnight. All of them can help you begin.
Write down what you are carrying. Take ten minutes and make a list of the things that feel heavy right now. Do not explain them or defend them. Just name them: the diagnosis, the divorce, the son who will not call, the job you hate, the prayer that never seems to get answered. Seeing the list on paper often makes it smaller than it felt in your head, or at least clearer.
Notice where you are waiting. Ask yourself, “What am I postponing until the right time?” It might be a conversation, a dream, a visit, a doctor’s appointment, an apology. You do not have to act on it yet. Just notice it.
Tell one person the truth. The next time someone you trust asks how you are, try saying something other than “fine.” You do not have to unload everything. Even “honestly, it has been a hard month” can open a door.
Take one small step. Like Quentin with his smoker in the church parking lot, choose one small thing that moves you from rehearsing toward living. Make the phone call. Sign up for the class. Write the first page. Go to the appointment you have been avoiding.
And if you pray, pray honestly. Not the polished prayer you think you are supposed to say, but the real one. “I’m tired.” “I’m angry.” “I don’t know if you’re there.” Honest prayer, like honest conversation, is where real things begin.
You have one life. It is heavy. Some of that weight was handed to you by history, by family, by circumstances you never chose. Some of it you picked up yourself along the way. Some of it is the simple, unavoidable weight of being a human being who loves things that do not last.
This book will not take that weight away. Nothing can. But I believe it can help you see it more clearly, carry it more wisely, and set down the parts that were never yours to carry in the first place.
Because the weight is real. But so is the strength to carry it. You have already carried more than you thought you could. You are still here, reading, still looking for something better. That is not nothing. That is the beginning.
So pull up a chair. Let the coffee go cold if it has to. We have a lot to talk about.
To be continued in One Life, coming soon.
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