Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life

by Shauna Niequist

That project I poured myself into fell apart spectacularly, and there was nothing I could do about it. And if you decide that’s the end of the story, it’s a bad one. But if you take the long view, you see that that project led me to Cold Tangerines, which led to the next book and the next. If you take the long view, you realize it was a speed bump, not a dead end. What life teaches us over time is that if you wait long enough, lots of things that look like dead ends are really just speed bumps.

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.

For me, it’s still all about daily, ordinary life. It’s still all about being a noticer, as a spiritual act. 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.

And that’s why I’m making a shameless appeal for celebration. Because I need to. I need optimism and celebration and hope in the face of violence and despair and anxiety. And because the other road is a dead end. Despair is a slow death, and a lifetime of anger is like a lifetime of hard drinking: it shows in your face and your eyes and your words even when you think it doesn’t.

The only option, as I see it, is this delicate weaving of action and celebration, of intention and expectation. Let’s act, read, protest, protect, picket, learn, advocate for, fight against, but let’s be careful that in the midst of all that accomplishing and organizing, we don’t bulldoze over a world that’s teeming with beauty and hope and redemption all around us and in the meantime.

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. Through that longing to be our best selves, we are changed and inspired and ennobled, able to see the handwriting of a holy God where another person just sees the same old tired streets and sidewalks.