I Guess I Haven't Learned That Yet: Discovering New Ways Of Living When The Old Ways Stop Working Quotes
"Being a writer means being committed to paying attention, to walking through the world as a noticer."
"One of the challenges of this book was defining the edges. Can it be about this too, and also this?"
"It may seem chaotic or like a disparate mishmash of topics and themes, as I try to write a book that encompasses faith and curiosity."
"We talk about how our kids are doing and Ted Lasso and biscuits and hard conversations with family and doctor’s appointments and shoes."
"At the very least, it seems that two core myths are being handily dismantled in the face of this pandemic: first, the myth of control, and second, the myth of independence."
"So what do we do? We pay attention. We accept the world as it is, not as we wish it was."
"I’m a forty-something mother of two, a Midwesterner living in Manhattan. I’m sometimes tired and sometimes afraid, sometimes hopeful and sometimes despairing."
"This is not a to-do list. This is not a prescription for success or a road map to spiritual perfection. This is a love letter, a handful of treasures, a lifeline."
"This is the book I wish someone had written for me when I was in a season of near-constant untethering and unbelonging."
"This is about a search for grounding when nothing feels stable, the yearning for peace in a raging storm."
"It’s about curiosity and compassion, and it’s about spiritual practices to weather the rough passages."
"I tend to scrunch my shoulders up around my ears more often than not."
"Every single day, I saw cousins and friends from high school and neighbors and people from church I’d known all my life."
"I was thankful for the hospitality of church members, but I never knew what to say."
"I still believe in religion as a meaningful way to gather and organize our lives."
"I’ve shed many illusions. But I am still deeply devout, possibly more than ever."
"We made the move from a house in the suburbs of Chicago to an 825-square-foot apartment on the third floor of a beautiful neo-Gothic redbrick building in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City."
"I guess I haven’t learned that yet. I wrote that sentence because I wanted us to have a common language for what it means to be a learner, a beginner."
"Self-compassion is letting yourself off the hook, letting yourself be human and flawed and also amazing."
"We find the courage to change when we feel loved. It unlocks our ability to move forward and grow."
"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."
"I have friends whose marriages have ended after decades, friends who no longer speak to family members because of political divides."
"Every single time throughout your life that you’ve hit the ground hard and fought to get back up will help you now."
"Earlier this year, I felt like I couldn’t find the rhythm, like I was underwater."
"I know what it’s like to breathe fresh clean air again after a long stretch of choking on the fumes of anger."
"Belonging to something larger than myself is lovely but isn’t for every season."
"It’s okay to let yourself change, to let an environment change you, a city change you, a season change you."
"Your discipline, your creativity, your stubborn hope—they’re changing you, little by little."
"When I look back now, I think about how extremely well defined my whole world was."
"Healthy, whole people don’t become healthy and whole on accident; it’s because they make the small, daily choices that build on each other."
"What’s important is that my kids know I get things wrong and that I’m not too prideful to admit it to them."
"Prayer is grabbing those worries in our fists and throwing them to someone who can hold them for us while we rest."
"Inspiration is part of the job description. It doesn’t strike like lightning."
"Cruelty and shame break us over time, and part of growth is choosing what we will and will no longer allow into our lives."
"We’ve created a system where people who know nothing about us can broadcast their take on us."
"I want more kindness, more love, more compassion. I can’t allow in cruelty or meanness or snark."
"The people who get to tell me who I am are the ones who have invested in me, who know me, who walk with me and see the everyday me."
"Empathy is choosing to see what connects us all—our common humanity."
"You are who you are, and also it’s okay to love one thing and then another."
"Maybe menopause is sharpening the pain to a point, pushing me to deal with my anger more deeply and directly than I would have otherwise."
"Yesterday’s snow squall seems to me just exactly the right image to capture the whole of this season—sudden darkness, heavy wind, a wild, magical swirl of sideways snow."
"It was equal parts beautiful and disruptive—not the afternoon any of us expected, but an entirely different thing, entirely out of our control."
"After the New Year, I immersed myself in writing... until I remembered who I was, until life made sense again, until I could grasp just one corner edge of hope."
"Yesterday, I felt exhaustion and hope, twinned. We’re not through the darkness yet, but we came through something this week, the end of something."
"Second, I forgive. I forgive the night. I forgive the people who have hurt me. I forgive the world for not being what I wanted."
"One of the reasons I became a writer was that I liked what it brought about in my life. Writing helps me, heals me, provides a place for all my thoughts and feelings."
"This year, Aaron and I started seeing a couples therapist, and that gave us a safe container to pour out everything we had weathered the last several years."
"Self-compassion isn’t unwillingness to take our own failings seriously. It’s following God’s example, tending to ourselves with the same kindness he shows us."
"I’m starting to understand what it means to belong to myself, to recover my own heart, to reassemble all the pieces that have been broken along the way."
"What I wanted was an easy name. What I got was a partner who teaches me and challenges me and heals me and walks with me better now than he did twenty years ago."
"Thinking back to that first fundamental question—are they a grower?—we haven’t gotten it all right, by any means, but we are growers."
"Taste memory is often nostalgic and often simple—very few of us cling to memories of sophisticated, fussy food."
"Every bite is perfect, and that’s why people—including us—put up with outrageously long wait times."
"I was flooded with memories of our life in Chicago, dates Aaron and I had been on, friends I’d sat with as we ate these same burgers all those years ago."
"There will be dancing. There will be pink dresses. There will be play. And delight and beauty and hope."
"And I’ll keep showing up in my ridiculous pink dress, despite my longing for invisibility. Because who knows who it is on the sidewalk who desperately needs an infusion of whimsy or enchantment or joy."
"This seems to be at the heart of everything right now—a willingness to show up, unarmed and unfiltered and wildly imperfect, looking the reality of life full in the face."
"I still say yes to life. I still say yes to creative work, to the church gathered, to storytelling and hospitality and living with an open heart."
"Is the world still beautiful? Still yes. Do our stories still matter? Still yes. Am I still hopeful? Still yes."