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

by Shauna Niequist

I no longer wait for joy to rise up unbidden. I put myself in her path every chance I get, and extending myself in that direction delivers me to gratitude, to hope, to a cascade of things that tumble out after joy but don’t show up without a little effort on our part.

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 smallest of reasons. 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 hold memories in your mind and play them over and over like an old-fashioned slideshow—click, click, click.

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.

I’m learning to put myself in the path of joy and beauty. I’m making my life small and simple. I’m building a shelter for myself—writing, walking, reading, cooking. 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.

When we’ve experienced a great loss, often we say we’re sad—we’re grieving or mourning—but what bubbles out of us like a volcano is anger: hot, volatile, explosive anger. Anger is active, powerful; it buoys us along and gives us something to do and focus on and sharpen. Anger makes us feel like we’re in control again, because loss is, at its core, loss of control, or the myth of it anyway—I couldn’t keep that person alive. I couldn’t make them stay. I couldn’t fix our problems. I couldn’t save whatever it is that was broken.

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.

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-prot...

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. I find my fragile grief, masquerading as powerful anger. I’m sad that this is a plot point I have to incorporate into the story of my life. That’s the heart of it. I don’t want this part. I want to stick my fingers in my ears like a child. I want to lock the door against it. You can’t be a part of my story.

Under the anger, there’s the soft belly of grief. Beautiful things have been broken, like the snapping of a branch. My heart believes in forgiveness—indeed, forgiveness has become increasingly central to my own spiritual practice and health.

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 a...

This is good. This is healing. Your pain is being rightsized—still real and still tender and still awful, but not the biggest, hardest thing in all the world. You start to have the emotional energy to offer to other people in empathy, seeing what they’re carrying ins...

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 differen...

Empathy is choosing to see what connects us all—our common humanity. Our common resolve as well as our common fragility, our common grief and terror and exhaustion as well as our common hope and joy and delight.

Empathy is when we see another person’s needs and longings as clearly as we see our own, when we feel another person’s wounds and scars as if they were wounds and scars on our very own body, our very own skin. Empathy stitches us together when a thousand loud things act as seam rippers, shredding the fabric of our connectedness. Empathy simply picks up a needle and begins stitching again—together, together, together.

Thomas Keller, one of my favorite chefs, has a way of thinking about recipes that I just love. He says the first time you use a recipe, do it exactly as written. Follow every direction, every measurement. That way, you taste what the recipe writer or the chef had in mind exactly. Then the next time, you rewrite the recipe in your own words as simply as possible—you’re moving from their language to your language. Once you’ve rewritten the recipe your way, make the dish according to your new recipe. The third time, make it only from memory, and make at

least one change—switch out a vegetable, change a spice—something to make it different from the original. Keller says that after you’ve made it for the third time, the recipe is yours. You’ve internalized it. It’s not a recipe in a cookbook; it’s in you, it’s part of you.

I’m an empath, a person who feels the feelings and emotions of the people around her quite acutely. Carrying the emotional weight of too many people—too many feelings and desires and expectations—flattens me. I want, genuinely, to meet the needs and expectations of all these people, but it’s mathematically impossible, so I end up exhausted and resentful.

The sheer volume of voices is too much for most of us, if we’re honest. It’s like standing in the center of a packed stadium every single day and expecting the constant noise and jostling not to take their toll on your spirit.

I’m consciously creating more silence in my life. I’m reading more and more books and fewer and fewer tweets. I think we’re going to look back at this hot-take outrage machine and grieve what we lost along the way: Sober-mindedness. Willingness to let a story unfold over time. Wisdom. Perspective. Kindness toward our fellow humans.

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.

Put down your phone. Delete your apps. Or even just move your social media a few sc...

Admit when your most tender or vulnerable times are, and discipline yourself not to open yourself up to social media in those moments. For me, that’s when I’m in bed. On the one hand, I’m sleepy and cozy and I want to scroll through and see what my friends’ cute kids are up to. On the other hand, why on earth would I allow thousands of strangers’ opinions to visit me while I’m in my pajamas? It’s insane what we’re allowing into our lives.

This may sound extreme, but especially when I was in a season during which I felt extra exposed

or was experiencing more cruelty than usual, I checked social media only while dressed at my desk, like ...

You decide who you allow into your life. Unfollow a whole slew of people. Make your world really quiet sometimes, especially when things are hard or when you have a difficult decision to make.

Follow people you want to be like—because that’s what happens, for better and for worse. If you curate a list of compassionate, kind people, you’ll bend toward kindness; if you curate a list of snark, you’ll start to hear it in your own voice. If everyone you follow is buying something or selling something, you’ll find that this wanting itch will get extra itchy over time.

There’s a proverb that reads, “Guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Proverbs 4:23). Anyone who went to Christian youth group knows this proverb mostly in a dating context, but wh...

days, I think about what I’m allowing in and what I’m not allowing in. I want more kindness, more love, more compassion. 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 a long time, I wanted people on social media to change—to be less cruel, to be decent, to be fair, to tell the truth. That would be lovely. But I’m not waiting around for that. I’m deciding who gets to enter my spaces, my heart, my mind, my living room, because I’m responsible for those places, no one else. I’m responsible to protect my mind, my heart, my family. I can’t change anyone else. I ...

make space for desire: What do I want? I want healing. I want to move through the pain and leave it behind. I want lightness and freedom of spirit.

I absolutely cried. It was so moving to hear someone say, I wanted to make something special for you. I wanted to create a space for us.

Hospitality is powerful. It can move us. It can heal us. It can remind us that we’re loved, that we matter, that someone cares we’re alive.

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.

Because people are great. And we need each other and we have so much to learn from one another.

Hospitality is the antidote to isolation, and we need it.

keep gathering, keep it weird, embrace the movable feast, and practice brave, awkward, difficult hospitality as a way of fighting against isolation and othering, a way of healing what’s been broken and loving our world and our own selves back to life.

getting rid of dresses that felt right in the Midwestern summer but never feel right in the city. Sneakers that give me blisters every single time, no matter the Band-Aid/heel pad/moleskin regimen. Half a dozen cozy fleeces that are perfect for an UpNorth campfire but have never made it out of the closet here. Blouses I’ve always hated but kept because they worked well enough—life is hard enough without walking around with something on your body that makes you feel bad.

We’re responsible to help create a world that values questions more than answers, that celebrates learning and not just knowing, that sees failure as a part of the process of success.

They’re at the beginning of so many things, and I’m in the rough and ugly middle, plenty of regrets and scars and mistakes, months and years I can never get back. But also, everything led us here. Could it have been any other way?

“Remember,” he said, “when we thought forty was super old, and that when you were forty, you’d know absolutely everything? You’d be done feeling uncertain and all the big pieces would be figured out. Remember?” And then we laughed loudly together for a long time like it was a hilarious joke.

At a time in life when most people are winding down and settling into routines, Grandpa did the opposite. If you think you’re too old to make a difference, you’re not. If you think you don’t have enough time left to build something really beautiful, you’re wrong. If you think your legacy-leaving window has closed, it hasn’t. It’s not too late for you. And it’s not too late for me.

There’s still time. You can still grow into something beautiful. You can still leave something lasting and nourishing. It’s never, ever too late to grow.

Time marches on. Nature marches on.

The world is still good, still beautiful, still dazzling and interesting and worth tasting and finding and savoring. God is still good, still faithful, still kind.

There’s a lot I don’t know, but there’s enough that I do.

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.