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

by Shauna Niequist

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.

there’s a blank nothingness and you realize you have to build a new life. You have to paint the canvas of your future, because it used to be such a well-developed, very specific image and now it is blank. This is terrifying. At some point—I promise—it will be a tiny bit exciting, this blankness.

A wise friend of mine says that true spiritual maturity is nothing more—and nothing less—than consenting to reality. Hello to here—not what you wanted or longed for or lost, not what you hope for or imagine. Reality. This here. This now.

I thought I needed a great army of friends, eleven sets of dishes, six pairs of boots, and two thousand books. I thought I needed an institution, a board of directors, a cozy blanket of like-minded, supportive people spread all over the country who would have my back in a heartbeat. Turns out you need three sweaters, rent money, and five really good people. You need eggs and coffee. A Kindle account, a metro card, and one good umbrella.

It’s easy, of course, to buzz the beach and find the sparkle on good days—days when the sun is shining and your heart is light. When it gets really dark, though, that’s when you start to understand that it’s a discipline, and you need it in the dark so much more desperately than you need it in the light. Joy and celebration are practices for the long haul.

He said the healing is in the trying. The healing is in the trying.

There are some people who leave early, and others who have a tendency to overstay, and I am an overstayer of the most extreme kind and have lived that way for most of my life. One of the most central learnings of midlife is learning how to let go.

Healthy, whole people don’t become healthy and whole on accident; it’s because they make the small, daily choices that build on each other. These little things won’t solve everything, but you might be surprised at how much difference they really can make—for

There are a million ways to be a responsible parent. There are a million ways to build a thriving marriage. There are a million ways to lead a meaningful life. But when you’ve lived only one way for a very long time, the messaging gets really loud, and anything different starts to seem suspect.

You are allowed to love tiny, daily, ordinary moments in your life. You’re allowed to feel wild joy for the simplest and smallest

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.

Grief involves the terrifying sense of being out of control, and anger gives us back the feeling of control—it’s not accurate but it’s familiar, and it feels a whole lot better than the tenderness and emptiness of sadness. If anger is active and powerful, grief and sadness are tender, vulnerable. Anger puts us back in the power position, while grief lays us bare,

I hope that the losses of the last several years have made me less blind, less demanding, less entitled. I hope that the pain has stripped from me some of the sense of deserving and imbued in me instead a sense of making peace with what is, a sense of being easily delighted. I hope it takes less and less to bring me joy with each passing month. I hope I am increasingly outraged at injustice in any form, but less offended or horrified when things don’t go my way. Some days I see glimmers of those things—wisdom hard-won, peace hard-earned. I hold tightly to those glimmers like a handful of gold coins, like a treasure. And I let the warmth and weight of those coins in my hand give me the courage to keep going. I know now that I’m strong enough, brave enough, whole enough to hold it all—how it was and how it ended.

I’m walking away, in search of another dream, another adventure, another chance to open my heart, another opportunity to listen and learn and become a wiser, more grounded, more empathetic person than I was a year ago, and a year before that. I believe there’s more out there for all of us. I believe in second chances, in making new lives, in letting go of what’s already dead or dying in search of resurrection all around us. One story doesn’t define me. One story doesn’t define you. I’m going to write a dozen more at least, and they’ll be stories about raising teens and getting older. There will be stories about New York, and wherever life leads after that. About half the things I said I’d never do are now things I’ve done, so I’m done making predictions.

But I read something recently about nautical flags—the kind that are, frankly, everywhere in our life at the lake—at the yacht club, in the boat barn, these sort of ubiquitous colorful flags that are as familiar to a sailing family as anchors and stripes. There’s a flag that means yes. And that same flag is the one used in a regatta to tell the sailors that the racecourse has been changed. Yes, and also—the path you planned has now been altered. Oh, I feel that in my soul. Yes, and change course. Yes, and the future is different than you anticipated. Keep going, but keep in mind that all your plans and preparations just went out the window.