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

by Shauna Niequist

I guess I haven’t learned that yet. I wrote that sentence because I wanted us to have a common language for what it means to be a learner, a beginner, to be curious and make mistakes and get back up. To ask questions and figure it out as we go.

“Buzz the beach” is what I say all summer long when we’re staying near the water, and it means going a couple minutes out of the way to see the water and the sky and the striped umbrellas and the sandy, happy beachgoers. I always want to buzz the beach—as a way of living, as a value, as a statement of faith.

buzz the beach because even on the worst days, even on the darkest days, the waves still come in and then recede, the wind still blows, the sun—that drama queen—still puts on a performance every night.

Because I still haven’t learned—not after all this pain, not after all this chaos, not after all this loss and heartache and confusion—that 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. 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.

There’s no quick fix. There’s no overnight success. There’s no silver bullet. There’s just starting where your feet are, letting yourself be a beginner, showing up anyway, over and over and over.

Life will break your heart in a thousand ways, but there’s still music and there’s still dancing. There’s still coffee and toast. There’s still kissing and there are still late dinners on busy sidewalks.

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.