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

by Shauna Niequist

complicated, I did not wake up joyful. I felt groggy and annoyed, and one

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.

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.

Self-compassion, simplicity, joy, rest.

The healthiest, most wholehearted people I know are the ones who have suffered, who have lost, who have wrestled, who have pushed back up to the surface.

I thought that getting fired from a job I loved was my reckoning—the thing that would break my addiction to security and control. It did and it didn’t.

So the anger manifests itself as fury because I feel out of control, but if I sit with the anger for a little while, if I let it teach me, if I get down on the floor with it the way you would a suspicious cat, over time the cat reveals itself to be not a lion but a kitten—brokenhearted, fragile, small.

You start to have the emotional energy to offer to other people in empathy, seeing what they’re carrying instead

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

Jesus did not preserve boundaries and traditions at the expense of humans.

He valued humans at the expense of previously held boundaries and traditions.

union, protection, joy, and sanctification.

lives and spirits and desires and frustrations,

I’ve tried to fix it but can’t. And living with a broken relationship to someone I care about so much bothers me every day.

prayed for union, that my friend will be connected and supported and that at some point I’ll be a part of that with them again. I prayed for protection—that they will be kept safe, body, spirit, heart. That nothing will cause them pain—not even me. I prayed for joy.

And then I prayed for their sanctification—that they will be brave and kind and generous, growing in tenderness and love for others and being willing to stand up for what’s right.

it’s only going to happen because we’re both humble and tender enough to drop our defenses,

God has not yet healed the relationship, but he has shifted my heart in a way that makes me believe nearly anything can happen.

it’s about how quickly a stranger can show up in my life and, more than that, why I keep letting them.

Why have I allowed strangers into my mental living room and my mind and my heart?

I’m not going to open my life and my heart to thousands of strangers and carry the weight of their opinions around with me everywhere I go.

I’m deleting and unfollowing and unsubscribing left and right these days for all sorts of reasons.

Read this and tried to delete accounts but doom scrolled instead.

The amount of time most of us are spending scrolling through other people’s lives and opinions is staggering—choose wisely whose voices you’re allowing into your life, because I know from experience that after a while, they become the voices not just on your screen but in your head.

It’s insane what we’re allowing into our lives.

“Guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Proverbs 4:23).

I can’t allow in cruelty or meanness or snark. Because our hearts are the wellspring, the center from which everything else flows, and it’s up to each of us to tend to our heart and protect it. For

when to put down my phone and protect my own life.

What does it mean to show up as deeply myself right now?

Journal prompt

Did you all just wake up and feel normal and at peace with your body? Did any of you feel at war, like a foreigner on foreign soil, like an enemy?

physical, embodied world until it comes to my own body. There

You are held. Your nervous system can unclench, just for a minute. You can allow yourself to go off high alert—I’ll take this shift.

These are my tears. This is my grief. This is my rage. I’m learning to own it and make space for it and tend to it instead of holding it at arm’s length.

It’s peeling back the facades, stripping the defenses, leaving me with only my rage, which is the point, which is the next step. Maybe it’s my superpower, my portal to my next self.

What a strong viewpoint. Such oowerful thinking to make your enemy a resource.

writing my way through the pain.

Sometimes when you’re practicing yoga, the long-term practice, over time, starts to yield something. You feel, mostly, like you’re just putting in your time, but little by little, you’re surprised by the benefits, both in your yoga practice and in the rest of your life—it’s working! It’s subtle, and you don’t always love the hour you spend doing it, but you can see the benefits and so you keep going.

Writing helps me, heals me, provides a place for all my thoughts and feelings and words, a place for all the wild birds in my head and my heart to fly around outside of me instead of inside of me, because that’s a hard way to live—with wild birds circling around your insides.

Through it all, I’m still here, still watching the light in the trees, still writing my way to a new self, here at my little magic desk.

The next day, I woke up to my new morning routine. I begin by feeling the unfeelable feelings and thinking the unthinkable thoughts.

Want

What’s happening inside me? What’s happening around me? What might I need to learn or unlearn or face right now?

Easter is sort of a gruesome holiday—you don’t get to the eggs or the pastels or the new life without confronting a violent death and a silent and desolate Saturday.

It’s a hard-won celebration,

early on Sunday morning, a priest unlocks those doors before anyone is out and about, and there’s that sense that all is right, that all is as it should be, the doors open, peace and hope restored once again. An open door, an empty tomb, life after death.

Hospitality is holding space for another person to be seen and heard and loved.

Definition of shane.

branch. Everything glowed green on the Close, our green space at the

Let’s all agree not to go back to that old way where the house has to be perfect and the food has to be perfect and the dishes have to be perfect.

These days, I feel like my plans exist in two manifestations: extreme close-up and very far-off lists. Like today I need to go to the dry cleaner, and someday I want enough bookshelves for all my books, but everything between those things is pretty fuzzy. Also, for the record, I probably won’t make it to the dry cleaner today. This is midlife. Aaron and I were talking on the way home.

all these lives—have been so powerfully shaped by the generosity and commitment of one man, and he’d be quick to say that they taught him more and gave him more than he ever gave them. Here’s an important aspect of this story: my grandpa met these young men when he was eighty-five years old.

This incredible story, these very rich and meaningful and transformative relationships—this all happened in five years.

It’s never, ever too late to grow.

December was a dark gift for me—it forced me to get more help, more support, to reach out to my doctor and therapist, to read and learn and practice a more self-compassionate way of living. Maybe it’s the care I engaged in after that day that enabled me to get through the next few months without a similar drop into darkness, even while the events of my life were impossibly difficult, painful, and chaotic in ways I never could have imagined.