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

by Shauna Niequist

One of the challenges of this book was defining the edges. Can it be about this too, and also this? How far can it stretch before it’s just a junk drawer? But looking back, I’ve pushed the edges in this way in every book I’ve written—a book about cooking is also about babies and friendship and prayer; a book about celebration is also about losing your job and forgiveness and Paris. Because that’s how life is—interconnected and multifaceted. We carry around our whole selves—our past and our parents, our loves and our limitations, our dreams and our grocery lists and our wounds. That’s how it always is. It may seem chaotic or like a disparate mishmash of topics and themes, as I try to write a book that encompasses faith and curiosity, compassion and self-compassion, learning to let go and learning to be a beginner again, midlife and menopause and moving. But this is how I think the world works, how our minds and spirits and conversations work—or at least how mine do.

Self-compassion is letting yourself off the hook, letting yourself be human and flawed and also amazing. It’s giving yourself credit for showing up instead of beating yourself up for taking so long to get there.

I tend to scrunch my shoulders up around my ears more often than not. I’m doing it as I write—such a bad habit—and once again I have to consciously force myself to roll my shoulders back and down, to propel my chest open by filling my lungs, to spread my shoulders wide and low.

us

child psychologist and parenting expert Wendy Mogel

Be enchanted by whatever’s currently enchanting your child.”

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.

The Speed of the Soul

Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust, a history of walking,

grief is somatic, that it locates itself in our bodies and, therefore, needs to be worked out of our arms and legs and chests with movement. For me, that meant walking.

there were a thousand days when a walk in the blinding sun and cold air brought me back to myself, the air in my lungs and the stretch in my hips. Forward motion worked out my grief and my anger and my fear, mile by mile. And it still does.

we referred to the spiritual aspect of our lives as a “walk.” How’s your walk? we asked each other, as a way of asking about our religious lives or practices. Someone might say, There’s a woman who walks closely with God.

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. That’s what happens when you walk with someone. I like the fact that it’s active, something that happens not just in our heads but also in our bodies. I believe religious life happens in our hearts and bodies and not just our brains.

There are times when I wonder about how technology disconnects us more than it connects us, and sometimes I think about air travel: Should we be able to g...

Maybe walking is the speed of the soul, the exact right pacing for our bodies and spirits and hearts and minds to reconnect,

There’s a lot of research these days about how running pushes the body, how hard it is on the body especially as we age, but walking doesn’t—walking feels deeply restorative to me, like it’s putting back together the things that have been frayed or broken apart in our lives throughout a day or a week. And it gets my mind moving again, ideas and images and words clicking together like toy railroad tracks, making a path for something beautiful

and powerful.

Saugatuck shirt

For years, when I’ve taught writing workshops or been interviewed on the topic of creativity, someone inevitably asks about “being inspired”—or staying inspired or getting inspired—and I get so excited. I jump up on my little soapbox and tell them what I know about inspiration, that there’s a myth that it’s mercurial and wispy, that it’s floaty and unpredictable and you just cross your fingers and hope it lands on you at the right time. “Not true!” I tell them. Inspiration is my responsibility. Inspiration is part of the job description. It doesn’t strike like lightning. I lay myself open to receive it. You can’t manhandle it or make demands of it, but you can put yourself in the path of it. You make yourself available to it. It’s my job as a writer to live in such a way that every time I sit down to write, I’m inspired, not in the moment necessarily, but in my life, as a way of life. What this means is that it’s my job, literally, to go to art galleries and read poetry and go for walks and spend time with interesting people. It’s part of my work to read widely and learn new things and be curious and ask questions and wonder and doodle and dream, because living inspired is a requirement for rich creative work. You can’t watch bad television and endlessly scroll Twitter and expect great things to show up on the page. It’s your responsibility as a creative person to actively put yourself in the path of inspiration. I learned some of this out of practical necessity. When I wa...

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

Grief gives up the pretense of control. It’s lonely and quiet and submitted to the enormity of what has been lost, like being underwater. For most of us, anger is more familiar—and much safer. A question though: If you take a long look at your anger, might there be grief underneath it, like a small child hiding behind a warrior? When it comes down to it, it takes more bravery to be sad than to be angry, but anger is a way of self-protecting—an armor we sometimes choose when sadness feels too scary.

Under the anger, there’s the soft belly of grief.

My heart believes in forgiveness—indeed, forgiveness has become increasingly central to my own spiritual practice and health.

And then over time, as you fight to heal, as you move forward, one foot in front of the other over and over again, you begin once again to see

other people’s losses as weighty and real—as real, even, as what you’ve lost.

Empathy is a sister to compassion. It’s a willing cracking open of the heart, over and over, an intentional tenderness of spirit. It takes discipline and bravery to practice empathy—it’s far easier to demonize the other when we focus on the differences and the distances, when we separate people into us versus them.

When I read the Bible, I read story after story of love, of redemption, of subverting the status quo in order to love more deeply and powerfully. Jesus is a surprising and almost shocking person—one who breaks boundaries and rules in order to love people who haven’t been loved by the world around them. That’s what it means to be a Christian—to model your life after Jesus, the one who embodies love. Jesus did not preserve boundaries and traditions at the expense of humans. He valued humans at the expense of previously held boundaries and traditions. Christlikeness is, at its core, about love—a brave, muscular, boundary-breaking love for all people, a commitment to human thriving on every level. I believe that calling myself a Christian means living up to Christ’s example of brave, sometimes shocking love.

Prayer is a way to entrust the people we love to God, especially when things feel out of our control. I’ve felt that out-of-control feeling so acutely this last year—I think all of us have. Prayer is acknowledging that we are not in control—but that someone is. There is a God who holds us, who holds it all, who is trustworthy and powerful, and who is more than strong enough to hold the enormity of our fear and worry. In the New Testament, Jesus prays for his disciples, the group of people he loves, about four specific things: union, protection, joy, and sanctification. I wanted to pray for the people I love in the same way, so I tried doing it like one of Keller’s recipes. The first couple times I did it, I used the specific form Jesus did—union, protection, joy, and sanctification—and wrote out my prayers so I could be specific and detailed. It was very moving

union, protection, joy, sanctification.

When we pray for people with whom we have difficult or painful relationships, God works lovingly and powerfully inside us, rebuilding and restoring us, shaping us into the kind of people who forgive and repair and give second chances—the kind of people we all want to be but can’t always get there

on our own. This is what prayer can do. This is what God can do.

Try praying every single day for a handful of people you love. Start with the four words, and then make it your own—your own words, your own rhythm, your own embodied and personal way of entrusting your family and friends to God through prayer, the way Jesus entrusted his disciples to his Father through prayer. And now here’s a challenge: include someone with whom you have a complicated or broken relationship. I’m not an expert in prayer or friendship or anything, but I do know that j...

Prayer changes us—i...

sacred tool, able to transform and rebuild us from the inside out, day by day, breath by...

Hospitality is holding space for another person to be seen and heard and loved. It’s giving someone a place to be when they’d otherwise be alone. It’s, as my friend Sibyl says, when someone leaves your home feeling better about themselves, not better about you.

I’m going to recommend John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space Between Us, Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies, and Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series to almost every living human. Also, Quartino in Chicago, The Southerner in Saugatuck, Canlis in Seattle, and Roberta’s in Brooklyn.

My faith is one of the most nourishing, healing, restorative parts of my life, and I’m unwilling to go without it as a protest. I see the church’s failings. I’ve seen many of them up close, much closer than I’d like. But show me something that hasn’t been corrupted by human hands. And my hands are as fallible as any. I still believe that the way of Jesus, even poorly done, is a better way than any other.

I recently watched workers put up scaffolding on the side of the chapel at the seminary.

felt disappointed when I first saw the scaffolding—it’s ugly, and the work is loud. And then all at once, I realized that the scaffolding and the repair work are ways of caring for this building I love. You put up with ugly and loud for a while because you’re committed to preserving something of great value. Without the scaffolding and the work, this precious building would crumble and decay.

I feel this truth reverberating through my life, because bricks and glass crumble and crack without that scaffolding from time to time, and human hearts crumble and crack too without deep work and intentional care. We only heal by investing in the difficult and ugly work, even if it isn’t pretty, even if it looks like a mess for a while. Sometimes people equate self-compassion and self-care with being selfish or overly self-focused and believe it’s somehow in opposition to faith. But God’s fundamental orientation toward

us is love. He made us with love, watches over us with love. Self-compassion isn’t unwillingness to take our own failings seriously. It’s following God’s example, tending to ourselves with the same kindness he shows us, even when we’ve failed, especially when we’ve failed. Another way to look at it: self-compassion and self-care...

Pain and loss are a reality of life for all of us, and they’re not punishments or referendums on our fundamental worthiness. Life breaks us, and then we put ourselves back together, a little stronger each time, a little braver each time, a little freer each time. And goodness and

peace and second chances and joy are not only for the unbroken. They’re for all of us. They’re for me. And they’re for you.

There are songs to write, recipes to try, meals to share, so much to discover and learn and soak up, so much

to see and hear and taste, so much to experience on this beautiful planet.

we don’t control the story as it unfolds. If you want to be in control of a life story, write fiction. Get a dollhouse. Puppets maybe.

While we all love a before and after, that’s not how life is. Most of life is before and after and back to middle and OMG! worse than before and tiptoe to middle and then amazing is-this-the-after? We think, I’m doing it! I’m a star! And then—another crash. We struggle

and learn and forget. We change and change back and change again.