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

by Shauna Niequist

What would our lives be like if our days were studded by tiny, completely unproductive, silly, nonstrategic, wild and beautiful five-minute breaks, reminders that our days are for loving and learning and laughing, not for pushing and planning, reminders that it’s all about the heart, not about the hustle?

I’m finding I make better decisions when I make fewer decisions.

I’m able to give more focused attention on the higher-stakes decisions in my life—the ones about parenting, marriage, friendship—when I don’t have to think hard about what to wear or how to manage all my stuff. The ambient noise of my life gets quieter when there’s less stuff in my life, and fewer decisions to make about that stuff. And in the newfound silences is space for connection, rest, listening, learning.

It’s been said a million times that the most important things aren’t things. But if we’re not careful, it seems, many of us find ourselves overwhelmed by all the stuff we have to manage, instead of focused on what we’re most passionate about—writing

And so at long last, I’m making peace with medium. And choosing to be happy. Rested, not exhausted, not afraid, not wired and panicky all the time. This is countercultural. This is rebellious.

This is hospitality at its core. This is the beat of my heart: to experience grace and nourishment, and to offer it, one in each hand, to every person I meet—grace and nourishment. You can rest. You don’t have to starve.

The messages of the world say, in no uncertain terms: ruin yourself, and starve yourself. Wring yourself out. Ignore your hunger, your soul, your sickness, your longing. Exhaustion and starvation are the twin virtues of that world, but I will not live there anymore. I will practice hospitality—the offering of grace and nourishment—to myself. Instead of being starved and small, I will be medium. And I will be happy.

But there’s tremendous value in traveling back to our essential selves, the loves and skills and passions that God planted inside us long ago.

What a loss—for me, for my family, for our community, for all the joy and laughter and silliness we missed out on because I was busy being busy.

I don’t want to get to the end of my life and look back and realize that the best thing about me was I was organized. That I executed well, that I ran a tight ship, that I never missed a detail. I want to look back and remember all the times I threw candy, even when it didn’t make sense. Especially when it didn’t make sense.

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.

I told her I wanted to write and be married and be a mom of boys and gather people in our home and help our church. Those are the things I wanted more than anything in the world.

When I begin the day drenched in that love—that centering awareness of my worth and connection to God—the day is different. I don’t have to scramble or hustle. Fear dissipates, and what I’m left with is warmth, creativity, generosity. I can make and connect and create and tell the truth, because my worth isn’t on the line every time, at every moment. Unconditional love changes everything. It is changing everything. I can rest. I can fail. I can admit need and weakness. I can exhale. It’s changing everything.

Whatever I build from here on out, whatever I make, whatever I write, whatever I create, I want the fuel that propels it to be love—not competition, not fear, not proving.

Saying yes means not hiding. It means being seen in all your imperfections and insecurities. Saying yes is doing scary things without a guarantee that they’ll go perfectly. Saying yes is telling the truth even when it’s weird or sad or impossibly messy. Saying yes is inviting chaos, and also possibility. Saying yes is building a new future, regardless of the past. Saying yes is jumping in anyway.

and when you ask for a book recommendation from me, hold on: I’m going to give you at least a dozen, or fifty. My love affair with books endures, or, if anything, is growing. My appreciation for a well-crafted sentence or a perfectly chosen word is only rising, and my fascination with narrative and characterization and revelation, especially in memoir, is akin to an obsession.

Each soul, every soul is worthy, because God made every soul, and because of his love, his Son came to earth and walked among us, because God’s love for us is so deep and wide and elaborate that he wants to be with us, to walk with us, to teach us how to live in that love and worthiness.

In three of the four Gospels, Jesus asks, “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”

“The whole world” is essentially all the things you’ve ever wanted—whatever success means to you, or the good life, or what it looks like to live the dream. Many of us have been living the life we’ve always wanted, or so it seems. But just under the surface of that lovely life is exhaustion, or isolation, or emptiness. It doesn’t matter how pretty things look on the outside if on the inside, there’s an ache from a lifetime of trying to prove your worth.

Our souls are of fundamental importance, truly the only things besides our physical bodies that we are entirely, independently responsible to steward. Many of us take care of our bodies with great attentiveness, conscious to fill our bodies with good things, to rest them well, to move and breathe deeply. After years of being careless with both my body and soul, trusting in some vague way that they’d probably be fine no matter what, I’m learning that both body and soul require more tenderness and attentiveness than I had imagined.

I realized that the love I was looking for all along is never found in the hustle. You can’t prove it or earn it or compete for it. You can just make space for it, listen for it, travel all the way down to the depth of your soul, into the rhythmic beating of your very own heart, where the very spirit of God has made his home, and that’s where you’ll find it.

Here’s the love: it’s in marriage and parenting. It’s in family and friends. It’s in sacrifice and forgiveness. It’s in dinner around the coffee table and long walks. It’s in the hands and faces of the people we see every day, in the whispers of our prayers and hymns and songs. It’s in our neighborhoods and churches, our classrooms and living rooms, on the water and in the stories we tell. And let me tell you where it’s not: it’s not in numbers—numbers in bank accounts, numbers on scales, numbers on report cards or credit scores. The love you’re looking for is never something you can calculate. It’s not something you can buy or earn or hustle for. It’s something you discover in the silence, in the groundedness, in the sacred risky act of being exactly who you are—nothing more, nothing less. In that still, holy space, the love you’ve been frantically hunting for all along will bloom within your ribs. And you will know, in that moment, that it has been there all along, like a whisper, the very Spirit of God himself.