I want to celebrate in the face of despair, dance when all we see on the horizon is doom.
Great art says the things we wished someone would say out loud, the things we wish we could say out loud.
The general world population will survive without one more stage production and one more gallery showing. This is the thing, though: you might not. We create because we were made to create, having been made in the image of God, whose first role was Creator.
Love, though, doesn’t allow hiding. Love invites whole selves and whole stories out into the light. Friendship sees into us, into our secrets, into our elaborate games and excuses. Friendship carries all this mess together, so that you don’t have to hide, so that you carry it together. What a miracle!
So now, out of desperation, I’m back to prayer. I’m back to prayer, sheepishly, because I couldn’t make my life work without it. I pray out of sheer lack of options.
I needed to know who should get the best of my energy: my boys or a company that asked me to speak for them. I needed to know what matters. And the image of that man in his tuxedo was all I needed. You will always regret something. You will always disappoint someone. But it isn’t going to be my husband and our boys. It has been, sometimes. But I’m learning. And I’m making things right.
He doesn’t tell the snow to that and become tain, or the rain to freeze itself into snow. He says, essentially: do your thing. Do the thing that you love to do, that you’ve been created to do.
I don’t want to get to the end of my life and look back and realize that the best thing about me was I was organized. That I executed well, that I ran a tight ship, that I never missed a detail.
In my rampant yes-yes-yes-ing, I said no, without intending to, to rest, to peace, to groundedness, to listening, to deep and slow connection, built over years instead of moments.
Go back to being loved; go back to your purpose. This thing I am being asked to do will not get me more love. And this will not help me meet my purpose. Some.
Pleasing is such a fraught and freighted word, it seems, saccharine and over-sweet. Let’s do so much more than simply please people. Let’s see them and love them and delight them, look deeply into their eyes. Pleasing is shallow and temporary joy, not nearly as valuable or rich as seeing or connection or listening. Pleasing feels like corn syrup, like cheap candy, while pleasure is homemade pie, rich with butter, thick with sugar and ripe fruit.
Oh, the quiet moments alone with God I sacrificed in order to cross a few things off the to-do list I worshiped.
The natural world is so breathtakingly beautiful. People are so weird and awesome and loving and life-giving. Why, then, did I try so hard for so long to get away without feeling or living deeply?
Share your life with the people you love, even if it means saving up for a ticket and going without a few things for a while to make it work. There are enough long lonely days of the same old thing, and if you let enough years pass, and if you let the routine steamroll your life, you’ll wake up one day, isolated and weary, and wonder what happened to all those old friends. You’ll wonder why all you share is Christmas cards, and why life feels lonely and bone-dry.
Bitter is what makes us strong, what forces us to push through, what helps us earn the lines on our faces and the calluses on our hands.
I don’t see the kids and the car seats and all the ways we’ve changed. What I see is a girl who was wild about a boy, and a bot who loved that girl right back. And it makes me happy to know they’re still in there, still inside us, like Russian dolls.
TRAVEL BREATHES new life into our sense of what is possible, and allows us to see our lives from a new perspective. When was the last time a new location opened up something new in you?
I have a truly manic commitment to leftovers. I’ll eat the same thing eight meals in a row, just so it doesn’t go to waste.
I wanted, of course, for this bittersweet season to be over. I felt so strongly that when I finished the book, I’d be free to move into another season, one of life and celebration. But this is what I know now: they’re the same thing, and that’s all there is.
Some of being an adult, though, is about protecting and preserving what we discover to be the best parts of ourselves, and here’s a hint: they’re almost always the parts we’ve struggled against for years. They make us weird or different, unusual but not in a good way. They’re our child-sides, our innate selves, not the most productive or competitive or logical, just true.