I Guess I Haven't Learned That Yet: Discovering New Ways of Living When the Old Ways Stop Working

by Shauna Niequist

If anyone tries to tell you that walking away from a church you’ve loved or a tradition you’ve loved or a community of faith you’ve loved is an easy thing to do, they’re lying to you. For me, it felt surgical. Sometimes it still does.

Things break and then they heal, stronger for the breaking. But it’s absolutely okay to cry along the way.

Death makes way for life. The winter yields to the spring. The night brings the dawn. This is reality. I’m terrible at accepting it, but I’m trying.

I love that phenomenon, that we go through life falling in love with new things because of the people we love, because of the paths they lead us down.

Prayer is grabbing those worries in our fists and throwing them to someone who can hold them for us while we rest.

I love thinking about our spiritual lives or religious experiences as a long walk with someone we love, someone we want to be near and learn from and know deeply.

Moving doesn’t change who we are, even though sometimes we wish it would. But it does change our vantage point on the world. It swivels us around to see things in ways we’ve never seen them before. It shakes loose our assumptions and brings us back around to humility and curiosity as we learn a new world, a new rhythm and map and set of customs and agreements, and all that work is good work, keeping us adaptable and open.

One of my goals is to be a person who is easily delighted, who can find great cause for celebration in a fig or a familiar face. If you need fireworks and perfection in order to crack a smile, you’re going to be disappointed over and over when life fails to be spectacular on command. I want to live with an extremely low bar for delight. It takes almost nothing at all—a good song, a ripe piece of fruit, a perfectly packed tote.

You are allowed to love tiny, daily, ordinary moments in your life. You’re allowed to feel wild joy for the simplest and smallest of reasons. You’re allowed to be unreasonably delighted by spicy pickles or a perfect apple or a joke your teen tells you. You’re allowed to be bewitched by your partner, even after all these years, to yearn to be close to him, to bury your face in his neck. You’re allowed to feel joy for almost no reason, except that you walked by the candle that your mother sent you and even when it’s not lit, just seeing it there on the hutch makes you happy. You’re allowed to hold memories in your mind and play them over and over like an old-fashioned slideshow—click, click, click.

Doing something badly is humbling and sometimes it’s frustrating, and for those of us who are used to being experts, it’s categorically worth every second.

Flowers are still blooming, show-offy and bright. The world is still good, still beautiful, still dazzling and interesting and worth tasting and finding and savoring. God is still good, still faithful, still kind. There’s a lot I don’t know, but there’s enough that I do.

I still believe that the way of Jesus, even poorly done, is a better way than any other.

But our stories, our living-and-breathing, flesh-and-blood, toss-and-turn-all-night, hit-the-snooze-seven-times lives don’t ever fit into the formats we’ve chosen, and I guess I haven’t learned that yet—and not for lack of opportunities. This is a stubborn one for me: Life doesn’t follow us. We follow it. We run after it, fight against it, catch up to it, make sense of it, get used to it—but it happens to us, not the other way around.

The best teachers, she said, are not the ones who arrive at 6:00 a.m. and leave at 6:00 p.m. The best teachers are the ones who go to museums and take art classes and go to the park and throw parties, because when you do all that living, you have something to bring to the classroom. You’ve learned something about yourself or about the city. You see patterns and metaphors. You have stories to tell and experiences to offer.

A few years later, here I am, realizing home isn’t singular, that you don’t lose one, but rather your world and your heart expand with each new home and new set of experiences, each new self and new street. The old ones stay, precious and tender, unlocked occasionally by a bite or a moment. And the new ones make your heart bigger and bigger, and your world bigger and bigger.