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

by Shauna Niequist

The narrator in me is desperate for resolution, but the plot is still unfolding, as much as I want the story to be over, to catch my breath, to have a still moment to look back over the last few years and decide what they were about. But I don’t have a second to decide what it was all about—I’m still in the deep waves, still just trying to gulp some air before the next one hits. 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.