ReThinking: Living each day like it’s your first with Suleika Jaouad

What It Covers

Suleika Jaouad, author of Between Two Kingdoms and The Book of Alchemy, discusses her approach to living with recurrent leukemia by reframing survival as living each day like it's your first rather than your last. She shares how journaling, shared writing practices with husband Jon Batiste, and cultivating childlike wonder help navigate uncertainty and mortality.

Key Questions Answered

• •Reframing mortality advice: Replace living each day as if it's your last with living as if it's your first. The traditional advice creates exhausting pressure to make every moment meaningful and prevents future planning. Living like it's your first day cultivates curiosity, playfulness, and wonder while allowing both present enjoyment and future dreaming, similar to how a toddler experiences the world with fresh eyes.
• •Ten images practice: Write down ten specific images from the past twenty four hours to train attention and memory. This prompt helps fact-check negative narratives during difficult periods, identifies what truly nourishes you, and trains your eye to notice details worth savoring. The act of writing images down increases their likelihood of entering long-term memory better than taking photos, which jolts you out of experiences.
• •Contribution journaling over gratitude: Document your daily contributions rather than only what you're grateful for. Research shows contribution journals create an active sense of mattering and inject greater meaning into life, while gratitude journals can leave people feeling passive as mere recipients. Ask yourself three things that mattered most today or what contributions made you feel most in integrity with yourself.
• •Shared journaling for relationships: Write three longhand pages daily directed to your partner as letters, photograph them, and exchange via text. This practice surfaces deeper conversations than phone check-ins and reveals surprising insights about yourself and your partner. The format creates space for the richer emotional content that emerges in writing but gets missed in casual verbal updates.
• •Visual journaling as adaptation: When circumstances prevent traditional writing, pivot to alternative forms like watercolor painting or voice memos. During a bone marrow transplant with impaired vision, switching from written journals to painting daily watercolors of fever dreams transformed terrifying experiences into sources of intrigue. Treating survival as a creative act requires staying limber and reimagining methods without abandoning the practice.