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.

The best way to start practicing self-compassion is to tap into the kindness...

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.

How does faith express itself in our blood-and-guts, sidewalks-and-streets daily lives? What does it mean to notice and bear witness to the ordinary moments of our lives—not the lofty ideas or peak experiences, but making sandwiches and making meaning and making a life, stitched together over time by all those moments of here?

What does it mean to be a noticer when what there is to notice is awful and you’d rather look away?

What if your beautiful/ordinary everyday life isn’t beautiful and hasn’t been for a long time? For a long time, “hello to here” was an easy thing to say, like throwing a party for all the lovely parts of my life: hello, hello, hello. But all of a sudden, it was hard to say hello. It was hard to look the reality of my life full in the face. Here wa...

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

you can love someone and learn from them and be deeply grateful for them for a season, and then bless their future.

I saw every relationship, connection, family as something to be incorporated into this fortress—now you belong and you’re in forever and please feel free to send your teenage daughter to stay with us in New York.

It’s about having less stuff, and buying less stuff, and making a new relationship to stuff in general, but it’s also about forgiveness—about how much anger and resentment you want to carry.

There have been stretches in the last couple years when I needed a wheelbarrow or even a semitruck to carry around all the anger and resentment I held on to.

It was one of the core activities of my days, just keeping that anger and resentment alive and sparking, tending it like a fire. I’d think about it, talk about it, have imaginary conversations with the people involved, fantasize about spilling it all out onto the internet with glee. I knew I never would, but it was fun to imagine. But at a certain point, all that anger was like a pile of garbage in the middle of the floor of our apartment. If we lived in a big house, maybe I could shove it all into a spare bedroom or a corner of the basement. But we need ever...

wasn’t enough room for hope and gratitude, for life, really, because...

I’m not saying I’m thankful for all the things that broke apart in life as we knew it before, but I like our actual lives better—the day-to-day parts. They’re lighter and more fun and more interesting. I know some things now, and I’m a lot less afraid of what might happen. I can make it through a lot. I know because I have.

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 ...

had no earthly idea that the blanket would unravel so thoroughly and so painfully. It did not feel exhilarating or at all like freedom. It felt like I would die, like I’d been cut off from oxygen and had seconds, not minutes.

In those first months, I regularly found myself pressing a hand to my chest, hard, like I was trying to hold my heart, slow it or reassure it or something. I learned later that that’s a technique used in body work and trauma recovery, and it doesn’t surprise me at all that my body taught it to me without words.

In the recovery movement, you often hear the phrase “it works if you work it.”

I want to be a person of great joy, and I’m not waiting around for someone else to deliver it to me.

I participate in my own healing, in my own inspiration, in my own practice of hope.

the time we spend making memories is never wasted, because nature reminds us that we’re part of a bigger whole, and that beauty matters and so does play. I buzz the beach because I want to live out my belief that there are more important things to do in a given day than to complete our to-do lists.

I 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.

Death makes way for life. The winter yields to the spring. The night brings the dawn. This is reality. I’m terrible at accepting it, but I’m trying.

Pain is pain and there’s no use comparing—in particular, there’s no use saying what you’ve been through isn’t bad enough. There’s no rating system, no Olympics of suffering. Dark is dark, period, but one way we distract ourselves from our own pain is by getting really concerned with everyone else’s pain. You become like a traffic cop for other people’s journeys—Oh, you think that’s bad? Oh, please, it’s barely dark where you are. Cry me a river. This is not helpful. Not for you, not for them.

And if you’re in the midst of a painful season, don’t feel guilty for catching yourself feeling happy every once in a while. That’s not wrong. That’s not betraying the loss. Let yourself be sad and then angry and then laugh really hard. Let yourself be tired and then anxious and then let yourself be surprised by a moment of beauty, of joy. This is how it is in t...

The healing is in the trying.

peeling my fingers, one by one, away from the life I’d been clutching with white knuckles, the life that

didn’t fit anymore, no matter how hard I was trying to hold on.

What I know now is I am able to stand, even without the scaffolding of belonging I’ve depended so heavily on.

It’s a little like stepping down onto your foot after the cast has been removed, holding your breath for just a second as you test the newly repaired bones. The bones support you, and you can hardly believe it. Another step, then another.

Resilience is, simply put, getting back up. It’s getting back up, 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...

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...

It gets easier. It gets easier to get back up the more you do it. It gets easier to grieve what’s gone and look honestly into the face of what remains the more often you have to do it. This is the way through.

Every single time throughout your life that you’ve hit the

ground hard and fought to get back up will help you now. And every time you get back up in this season, it will build inside you the resilience you’ll need for the next seas...

The good news: nothing is wasted. Your discipline, your creativity, your stubborn hope—they’re changing you, little by little. And the next season of great pain and challenge will be just a little e...

Good things take time. I know what it’s like to have your heart broken. And also, I know what it’s like to forgive, little by little, over and over, a little more each day. I know what it’s like to breathe fresh clean air again after a long stretch of choking on the fumes of anger. And I know now that I can trust myself, that I can belong to myself, that belonging to something larger than myself is lovely but isn’t for every season. It’s a little lonelier out here, a little rockier. I’m learning to make myself a home in the wilderness, in the unbelonging itself.

One of the most central learnings of midlife is learning how to let go.

it’s about the freedom and joy that come with letting yourself reimagine almost everything.

“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.”

Maybe walking is the speed of the soul, the exact right pacing for our bodies and spirits and hearts and minds to reconnect, to dwell together again. The soul doesn’t thrive in absolute stillness because of what the body holds that needs to be worked out—that grief, that anger. But too high a rate of speed, especially over time, violates the soul, and it’s the walking that knits it back together.

This little apartment will always taste like baguettes from La Bergamote, sliced lengthwise and toasted and buttered, eaten while perched on the stool in the corner of the kitchen, looking out the window.

go to art galleries and read poetry and go for walks and spend time with interesting people.

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 acti...