Present Over Perfect: Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living

by Shauna Niequist

Years ago, a wise friend told me that no one ever changes until the pain level gets high enough. That

Now I know that the best thing I can offer to this world is not my force or energy, but a well-tended spirit, a wise and brave soul.

if someone gave you a completely blank calendar and a bank account as full as you wanted, what would you do?

honest, I overcompensate for my absences by trying to make my home time spectacular. Look, I didn’t miss a beat! Look, you’ve got everything you need and then some! Look, you didn’t even notice I was gone, what with all the perfectly folded clothes and perfectly washed grapes and perfectly planned activities.

Part of being an adult is taking responsibility for resting your body and your soul. And part of being an adult is learning to meet your own needs, because when it comes down to it, with a few exceptions, no one else is going to do it for you.

Which brings us, literally, to the heart of the conversation: the heart, the cavernous ache. Am I loved? Does someone see me? Do I matter? Am I safe?

You can make a drug—a way to anesthetize yourself—out of anything: working out, binge-watching TV, working, having sex, shopping, volunteering, cleaning, dieting. Any of those things can keep you from feeling pain for a while—that’s what drugs do. And, used like a drug, over time, shopping or TV or work or whatever will make you less and less able to connect to the things that matter, like your own heart and the people you love. That’s another thing drugs do: they isolate you.

As I unravel the many things that brought me to this crisis point, one is undeniably my own belief that hard work can solve anything, that pushing through is always the right thing, that rest and slowness are for weak people, not for high-capacity people like me.

It’s just so busy, everyone’s so busy. Kids, you know. School, right? Work is insane. Piano and hockey. In-laws and baby showers and moving houses and book club and who has time? And then someone buttoned up that conversation the same way we always do: But what are you going to do? We murmured agreement, sipped our lemonade, dangled our legs in the cool water,

don’t worry: no won’t always be the word you use most often. I hate that for a season, no had to be the answer to almost everything. But over time, when you rebuild a life that’s the right size and dimension and weight, full of the things you’re called to, emptied of the rest, then you do get to live some yes again. But for a while, no is what gets you there.

Some people are very uncomfortable with the idea of disappointing anyone. They think that if you are kind, you’ll never disappoint anyone. They think that if you try hard enough, if you manage your time well enough, if you’re selfless enough, prayerful enough, godly enough, you’ll never disappoint anyone. I fear these people are headed for a rude awakening. I know this, because I was one of those people. For so many

What you need along the way: a sense of God’s deep, unconditional love, and a strong sense of your own purpose. Without those two, you’ll need from people what is only God’s to give, and you’ll give up on your larger purpose in order to fulfill smaller purposes or other people’s purposes.

Some of being an adult, though, is about protecting and preserving what we discover to be the best parts of ourselves, and here’s a hint: they’re almost always the parts we’ve struggled against for years. They make us weird or different, unusual but not in a good way. They’re our child-sides, our innate selves, not the most productive or competitive or logical, just true. Just us. Just very simply who we are, regardless of how much quantitative value they add.

I’m worried about this child, or I’m hurt from this conversation. I’m lonely, I’m scared. I don’t know how this thing will even get fixed. Pour out all the vinegar until it’s gone. Then what you find underneath is the oil, glistening and thick: We’re going to be fine. God is real and good and present and working.

nearer and nearer to is agency. Or maybe authority: owning one’s life, for better and for worse, saying out loud, “This is who I am, this is who I’m not, this is what I want, this is what I’m leaving behind.” In my experience, our culture teaches men to do this quite well. Women, it seems, have a much trickier time with it. It’s only quite recently that women have even been permitted to ask these questions, and we’re just getting the hang of it, many of us, fumbling and awkward—really, really? Me? Are you sure?

Some of us are made to be faster, and some slower, some of us louder, and some quieter. Some of us are made to build things and nurture things. Some of us are made to write songs and grants and novels, all different things.

We get to decide, which is both so freeing and such a beautiful responsibility. You can be a vegan. You can be a priest. You can homeschool. You can train for a triathlon. You can live in the city. You can read the classics. You can buy all your clothes from a vintage shop.

Most women I know, myself certainly included, have struggled to find our own footing and calling and voice. I’m so very thankful for the solid ground that seems to multiply a couple square inches under my feet with each passing year.

That idea, though, of the legacy I’m leaving is rattling around in my brain and my heart. I’ve preferred to believe that I can be all things to all people, but when I’m honest about my life, in the past couple years I’ve been better from a distance than I have been in my own home—I’ve given more to strangers and publishers and people who stand in line after events than I have to my neighbors, my friends. I come home weary and self-protective, pulled into a shell of exhaustion and depleted emotions. This is, to be clear, not the legacy I want to leave.

And if you can wean yourself off the drug of quick charm, off the drug of being good at something, losing yourself in something, the drug of work or money or information or marathon training—whatever it is you do to avoid the scary intimacy required for a rich home life—that’s when love can begin. But only then. It’s all in here, not out there.

Sometimes brave looks more like staying when you want to leave, telling the truth when all you want to do is change the subject.

Present is living with your feet firmly grounded in reality, pale and uncertain as it may seem. Present is choosing to believe that your own life is worth investing deeply in, instead of waiting for some rare miracle or fairy tale. Present means we understand that the here and now is sacred, sacramental, threaded through with divinity even in its plainness. Especially in its plainness.

Present over perfect living is real over image, connecting over comparing, meaning over mania, depth over artifice. Present over perfect living is the risky and revolutionary belief that the world God has created is beautiful and valuable on its own terms, and that it doesn’t need to be zhuzzed up and fancy in order to be wonderful.

Love, though, doesn’t allow hiding. Love invites whole selves and whole stories out into the light. Friendship sees into us, into our secrets, into our elaborate games and excuses. Friendship carries all this mess together, so that you don’t have to hide, so that you carry it together. What a miracle!

Writing is such good training for the rest of life, if you allow it to be, because it forces you to get comfortable with failure, with the wide range of impossible-to-meet expectations and standards. I hear all the time that I’m both too conservative and too liberal, too shallow and too deep, too casual and too formal.

How we live matters, and what you choose to own will shape your life, whether you choose to admit it or not. Let’s live lightly, freely, courageously, surrounded only by what brings joy, simplicity, and beauty.

Okay, six more months. Six more. Oops. I don’t know what I was doing the last six months, but six months from now, for sure.

Truth-telling, though, is both contagious and addictive, and once you start doing it, it’s hard to stop. All of a sudden, opinions fell out of my mouth left and right. I knew so well, so deeply that the areas in which my life went off course were the same areas in which I had abdicated responsibility and voice. I did what “people” thought would be good for me. I did what “should” have been done. I became what I was “expected” to become. And it did not get me where I wanted to be.

There’s something, I’m sure, about going back to the places you used to go to find the self you used to be. Maybe my long-ago essential self is more readily apparent here on these docks and benches and flaking chairs because so much of my life was spent here. Maybe that’s why life at the lake continues to move me so deeply, because it draws me back to my past, who I’ve always been, underneath the recent shell I’ve been wearing—achievement, efficiency, productivity.

We’ve built a life and a family on love and art and messiness, and fifteen years later we’re still trusting that there’s plenty of space in this life we’ve created for two dreams, two passionate wild-hearted makers.

By Mary Oliver One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice— though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you didn’t stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do— determined to save the only life you could save.

The best way to start practicing self-compassion is to tap into the kindness you show other people. So many of us are voices of love for the other people in our lives, and it’s when we learn to speak with that same voice of love to ourselves that we’re able to make meaningful change. Self-compassion is learning to say, I guess I haven’t learned that yet.

That’s how it works. The changes connect and cascade, and the only way through it, it seems to me, is with curiosity and self-compassion, one in each hand, the tools for the journey. I’m not a natural at either one, although I’m learning to practice both with increasing regularity. There’s so much I don’t know, so much I’ve gotten wrong, so much I still want to learn and experience and understand as life unfolds. I keep moving forward, keep putting one foot in front of the other, holding tightly to the greatest gifts I’ve been given in recent years—curiosity and self-compassion. Apply as needed, over and over and over.