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

by Shauna Niequist

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.

We find the courage to change when we feel loved. It unlocks our ability to move forward and grow.

Self-compassion is learning to say, I guess I haven’t learned that yet.

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’ve been training all my life to pretend I’m fine and have let my body suffer for it.

I believe in seeking out beauty absolutely every chance we get, as an act of prayer, as an act of worship, as an act of resistance. I believe in going out of our way if it means getting to see the water or the mountains or the sky streaked with colors. I believe in attending the sunset the way some people buy fancy theater tickets.

The people I admire most are people who take celebration and memory making seriously.

not just after the first fall, but the ninth and tenth and seven hundredth. Resilience is feeling your exhaustion and choosing to move forward anyway. Resilience is watching your lovingly made plans fall to dust in your hands, grieving what’s lost and making (yet another) plan. It’s being willing to lay down your expectations for what you thought your life would be, what this year would be, what this holiday season would be, and being willing to imagine another way.

there are no quick fixes, no overnight successes, that everything good and worthwhile takes time, and generally way more time than we like to imagine. Good things take time.

“I’ve been seeing worried parents for decades now. Parents worry, and kids are mostly fine. Just do this one thing: Be enchanted by whatever’s currently enchanting your child.”

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

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.

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 sm...

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 al...

I’m learning to choose myself instead of giving the best of myself to people and relationships and institutions. Loyalty to myself. Belonging to myself. Looking for joy just for myself. I need a disproportionate amount of care right now, and the one who is responsible for that care is me. I can’t assume that someone else will do it; it’s my responsibility to create a rhythm for my life that nurtures me, that brings me joy, that allows me to flourish, even given the weight of things I’m carrying.

We aren’t trying to live in New York as though it’s the exact same place we came from.

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, like letting ourselves lie down on a sidewalk, knowing we could get stepped on, crushed. 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.

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.

One way you realize you’re healing: For a while, what you’ve suffered is the biggest thing you can imagine. In your pain and suffering, you twist reality around your own wound and you see the whole world through the lens of your pain. For a time, what you’re facing really is the biggest, ugliest, cruelest thing that anyone could ever be allowed to experience. 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.

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.

More prayer yielded more attentiveness to their lives, which inspired me toward more prayer,

Make your world really quiet sometimes, especially when things are hard or when you have a difficult decision to make.