Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life

by Shauna Niequist

The years show on my face, and that’s okay, because all the best things leave their mark, and I’m thankful for the years and also for the marks they’ve left.

I still believe we’ve been created by a God of love, and that this God is still working and guiding and whispering. I still believe that the world he created is impossibly beautiful, even in its brokenness. I still believe that people have the capacity for incredible goodness, and also that we’ll hurt each other in shocking ways.

I still believe that everyday life as it’s unfolding on our plain old streets and sidewalks is the most extraordinary thing most of us will ever experience. I still believe that daily life is where our lives change, where we learn to love, where we learn from our mistakes, where we sense God’s presence, where we learn to tell the truth and make things right, where our hearts are broken and our wounds are laid bare and healed up. So many of the lofty concepts of faith and truth and meaning find their value and grounding not in conceptual spaces but in kitchens and living rooms and subway stations and in the silence between words and while you’re folding the laundry. This is where life is. This is where everything is.

I notice as a way of saying thank you, as a sacrament almost, as a way of bearing witness to what’s lovely and good and meaningful in the world.

I want to be a noticer. God made this world, made people, made flowers and honey and the Hudson River. The people he made with great love and in his image have written poetry and built buildings, and they perform surgery and bake bread and play the violin, and one of my most deeply held spiritual practices is noticing it all.

What God does in the tiny corners of our day-to-day lives is stunning and gorgeous and headline-making, but we have a bad habit of saving the headlines for the grotesque and scary.

To choose to celebrate in the world we live in right now might seem irresponsible. It might seem frivolous, like cotton candy and charm bracelets. But I believe it is a serious undertaking, and one that has the potential to return us to our best selves, to deliver us back to the men and women God created us to be, people who choose to see the best, believe the best, yearn for the best.

Life is a collection of a million, billion moments, tiny little moments and choices, like a handful of luminous, glowing pearls. And strung together, built upon one another, lined up through the days and the years, they make a life, a person.

That thing I’m waiting for, that adventure, that movie-score-worthy experience unfolding gracefully. This is it. Normal, daily life ticking by on our streets and sidewalks, in our houses and apartments, in our beds and at our dinner tables, in our dreams and prayers and fights and secrets—this pedestrian life is the most precious thing any of us will ever experience.

I choose to believe that there is nothing more sacred or profound than this day.

I believe that if we cultivate a true attention, a deep ability to see what has been there all along, we will find worlds within us and between us, dreams and stories and memories spilling over.

This is it. This is life in all its glory, swirling and unfolding around us, disguised as pedantic, pedestrian non-events. But pull off the mask and you will find your life, waiting to be made, chosen, woven, crafted.

You have stories worth telling, memories worth remembering, dreams worth working toward, a body worth feeding, a soul worth tending, and beyond that, the God of the universe dwells within you, the true culmination of super and natural. You are more than dust and bones. You are spirit and power and image of God. And you have been given Today.

That’s how family gets made. Not by ceremonies or certificates, and not by parties and celebrations. Family gets made when you decide to hold hands and sit shoulder to shoulder when it seems like the sky is falling. Family gets made when the world becomes strange and disorienting, and the only face you recognize is his. Family gets made when the future obscures itself like a solar eclipse, and in the intervening darkness, you decide that no matter what happens in the night, you’ll face it as one.

I imagine that God does that to me, puts his hand on my head, on my heart, on my savage insecurities, and as he does it, he thinks thankful thoughts about me.

Friendship is acting out God’s love for people in tangible ways. We were made to represent the love of God in each other’s lives, so that each person we walk through life with has a more profound sense of God’s love for them. Friendship is an opportunity to act on God’s behalf in the lives of the people that we’re close to, reminding each other who God is. When we do the hard, intimate work of friendship, we bring a little more of the divine into daily life. We get to remind one another about the bigger, more beautiful picture that we can’t always see from where we are.

True friendship is a sacred, important thing, and it happens when we drop down into that deeper level of who we are, when we cross over into the broken, fragile parts of ourselves. We have to give something up in order to get friendship like that. We have to give up our need to be perceived as perfect. We have to give up our ability to control what people think of us. We have to overcome the fear that when they see the depths of who we are, they’ll leave. But what we give up is nothing in comparison to what this kind of friendship gives to us. Friendship is about risk. Love is about risk. If we can control it and manage it and manufacture it, then it’s something else, but if it’s really love, really friendship, it’s a little scary around the edges.

“Help us to be brave with one another, for these are the days.” She was right. They were the days. They were singularly beautiful, terrible days. In some ways, I was never more myself, and in others, never more unrecognizable. But we were brave with one another, which is, I’m finding, more than one can ask for.

all that little girl wanted to be was a storyteller, a poet, a person who gathers and arranges words like some people gather and arrange flowers.

During a time when I had nothing to give but venom and tears, when I monopolized conversations and entertained the same conspiracy theories over and over again, this small circle of people were the words and fragrance and presence of God in unmistakable ways.

We can’t stand in the way of death, but when it comes, we can stand in its face together, and celebrate life and celebrate family and celebrate having loved fiercely and expressively.”

You pray for wonderful, honest, gritty, tender stories to write, but then you have to live through them.

He’s hiding, like a child, in quite obvious and visible places, because he wants to be found. The miracle is that he dwells in both. I knew he dwelt in the latter, the bright and beautiful, because I had been finding him there for years, in the small moments of beauty and hope that poke through the darkness of our days. But lately I have been finding him not just under the darkness, but in it, right within the blackness and deadness of these days. I have found a strange beauty in the darkness, one I’ve never seen, a slower, subtler beauty, like how an old woman’s skin is more telling and rich than a teenage girl’s, how a storm can make you feel more deep emotion than a sunny day ever did.

We tell God’s story as we live and discover our own. We know that God is a storyteller. He’s a mad scientist and a father and a magician, and certainly, he’s a storyteller.

There are things that explode into our lives and we call them curses, and then one day, a year later or ten years later, we realize that they are actually something else. They are the very most precious kinds of blessings.

We can dig in, make plans, write in stone, pretend we’re not listening, but the voice of God has a way of being heard.