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 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.

So much of the life I’ve lived up to this point was about holding things together, preserving them, never letting something fall or fall apart. It was like I was building a fortress, thick walls and foundations that went practically to the center of the earth itself. I was gathering people and years and traditions, wrapping people into it, weaving families and stories and moments and dinners together, trying to make something heavy and durable, something that would keep me safe.

And moving to New York taught me a million things about living more lightly—that you can love someone and learn from them and be deeply grateful for them for a season, and then bless their future.

Turns out you need three sweaters, rent money, and five really good people. You need eggs and coffee. A Kindle account, a metro card, and one good umbrella.

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.

Practice your vocation or calling, whatever you understand that to be, because the practice of it will keep you connected to your own deepest self and to the God who planted those gifts inside you.

I’m a belonger, a joiner, a deeply loyal person who would prefer to live surrounded by a raft of old friends, family members, inside jokes, shared traditions. I’d like to be advised on all major decisions by a personal board of directors.

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

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.

Last summer, I heard the phrase “let go or be dragged,” and I felt it in every fiber of my being. The phrase is a Zen proverb, and it put words to an experience I had over and over again in the last several years. There are some people who leave early, and others who have a tendency to overstay, and I am an overstayer of the most extreme kind and have lived that way for most of my life.

part of being his partner is loving what he loves.

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.

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 actively put yourself in the path of inspiration.

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’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 be bewitched by your partner, even after all these years, to yearn to be close to him, to bury your face in his neck.

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.

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.

The next couple times, I prayed while I was walking in the city—union, protection, joy, sanctification. After that, I started using my own words that get at the same things—instead of union, support; instead of protection, blessing; instead of joy, delight; instead of sanctification, Christlikeness.

More prayer yielded more attentiveness to their lives, which inspired me toward more prayer, and so on.

Try praying every single day for a handful of people you love. Start with the four words, and then make it your own—your own words, your own rhythm, your own embodied and personal way of entrusting your family and friends to God through prayer, the way Jesus entrusted his disciples to his Father through prayer.

Prayer changes us—it’s God’s sacred tool, able to transform and rebuild us from the inside out, day by day, breath by breath, prayer by prayer.

That’s grind culture, hustle culture, productivity culture, that voice that tells us we are what we make, what other people can see, what we can monetize.

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.

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.

I still believe that the way of Jesus, even poorly done, is a better way than any other.

She showed me during those years that faith is something you tend to, something you nurture, something you dismantle and rebuild, something you wrestle with because it matters that much to you.

Increasingly, when I think about how to measure a day, a season, a life, I’m committed to different metrics, to abundance instead of scarcity, to care instead of competition, to meaning instead of measuring. If all you value is work, then productivity is the metric. But if you can shift out from under the weight of that, then the world refracts against itself like a kaleidoscope again, again, again. Not what did you make, but what did you heal from? Not how far did you go, but how hard did you fight to be free?

Every generation believes that theirs is special, balancing on an edge, a razor’s-edge precipice—now, now, now, all the urgency. But they’re gone now, and we will be too, swept up into the past, another special generation on the stage while we watch from the wings.

we do better work—we’re actually more productive, not less productive—when we tend to ourselves with kindness and compassion than when we try to motivate ourselves through fear and shame.

Inhale, exhale, try softer.

as long as we all keep showing up, keep dancing, keep seeing each other, I think we’ll all get to wherever we’re going, and I think we’ll all discover our wild, weird, brave next selves along the way.