Review of Living and Loving After Betrayal, by Steven Stosny

Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth, Relationships, Starred Review 0

Living and Loving After Betrayal

How to Heal from Emotional Abuse, Deceit, Infidelity, and Chronic Resentment

by Steven Stosny, PhD

New Harbinger Publications, Oakland, CA, 2013. 235 pages.
Starred Review

Steven Stosny’s books helped me tremendously after my husband left me, particularly You Don’t Have to Take It Any More, which was retitled Love Without Hurt. I also went to his Compassion Power Boot Camp after I moved to Virginia, and it helped tremendously in my healing.

However, those materials were designed to help someone when in the middle of an abusive relationship. Now that my divorce is final, I have no more contact with my ex-husband.

So I was delighted when I heard about Steven Stosny’s latest book, Living and Loving After Betrayal. It uses his powerful approach of self-compassion to help you heal after betrayal and be ready to love again — whether getting back together with your spouse or someone else.

Now, I’ve come a long way since my husband left me. But these are wonderful reminders of how to stay healthy. Just this morning, I woke up from a dream about my ex-husband that made me feel rejected all over again. I turned to Steven Stosny’s methods, reminding myself of my core value, and didn’t get sunk in feeling bad all day.

What’s more, if I ever dare to get in a new relationship, I am glad to have this wise advice about avoiding a potential betrayer, and learning to trust again. And reading this also makes me less afraid to start a new relationship.

As with his other books, the crux of Steven Stosny’s healing techniques is self-compassion, and focusing on your own core value.

He doesn’t focus on what happened, but more on how to heal. However, he does understand that betrayal is hard to overcome.

Whether it crashes upon you in revelation or seeps into consciousness via delayed realization, intimate betrayal snatches the floor of personal security from under you. Most of my clients describe the initial aftermath of revelation and realization as a kind of free fall, with no bottom in sight. Shock and disbelief are punctuated by waves of cruel self-doubt:

Was I attractive enough, smart enough, successful enough, interesting enough, present, attentive, caring, patient, or sacrificing enough?

He shows you how to use your emotional pain to help yourself to heal, improve, repair and grow.

Self-compassion is a sympathetic response to your hurt, distress, or vulnerability, with a motivation to heal, repair, and improve. It brings a sense of empowerment — a feeling that you can do something to make your life better, even if you are not sure what that might be at the moment. It tends to keep you focused on solutions in the present and future.

Self-criticism is blaming yourself for your hurt, distress, or vulnerability, usually with a measure of punishment or contempt. It’s based on the mistaken idea that if you punish yourself enough you won’t make similar mistakes in the future, when just the opposite is true — self-punishment leads to more mistakes. (Who is more likely to make more mistakes, the valued self or the devalued self?) Self-pity is focus on your pain or damage with no motivation to heal, repair, or improve. It has an element of contempt for your perceived incompetence or inadequacy because it assumes that you can’t do anything to make your life better. Needless to say, self-criticism and self-pity turn pain into suffering.

One of the problems after betrayal involves post-traumatic stress and obsessive thoughts. This book shows you how to recondition your brain with restorative images whenever painful thoughts surface. I was able to use those techniques this morning after waking up from a dream about my ex-husband. They work!

Steven Stosny explains that the key to healing and growth is your core value.

Core value grows out of the uniquely human drive to create value — to make people, things, and ideas important enough to appreciate, nurture, and protect. Consistently acting on the drive to create value provides a sense of meaning and purpose in life. This chapter and the next will help develop your core value as a general means of healing and growth. Although a highly developed core value won’t make you forget your betrayal, it will definitely make all that you have suffered less important in your life as a whole. The past can no longer control us, once it is overshadowed by the deeply human drive to create value and give our lives meaning.

He finishes the book with tips about getting into a relationship again, whether with your betrayer or someone new. Here’s hoping I will have a reason to look at those tips again! Reading this book made that idea seem much less impossible. Here’s to healing!

Steven Stosny’s blog, Anger in the Age of Entitlement
compassionpower.com
newharbinger.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Pursuing the Good Life, by Christopher Peterson

Musings, Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth, Starred Review 0

Pursuing the Good Life

100 Reflections on Positive Psychology

by Christopher Peterson

Oxford University Press, 2013. 341 pages.
Starred Review

I’m rather fascinated by Positive Psychology. I’ve read books like How We Choose to Be Happy, You Can Be Happy No Matter What, and What Happy Women Know: How New Findings in Positive Psychology Can Change Women’s Lives for the Better, and enjoyed all of them.

Christopher Peterson was one of the founders of the field of Positive Psychology. This book is a set of 100 short pieces taken from his Psychology Today blog called “The Good Life“. I approached the book by reading one piece per day for the last few months. (I had to turn the book back in a few times, too!) The pieces were fascinating, or at least amusing, and often helpful.

Here’s a paragraph from Dr. Peterson’s first chapter:

My goals for the reflections that follow are several. First, I will discuss research findings about the psychological good life. Second, I will explore the most promising practical applications based on these findings. And third, I will use positive psychology as a vantage to make sense of the world in which we live. I hope you find what I say interesting.

Indeed, you might not expect to find a book written by an academic to be entertaining and practical at the same time, but this one is both of those things.

oup.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of God Believes in Love, by Gene Robinson

Christian, Current Issues, Nonfiction Review 0

God Believes in Love

Straight Talk about Gay Marriage

by Gene Robinson
IX Bishop of New York

Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2012. 196 pages.

Here’s a thoughtful, intelligent, personal, and thoroughly Christian presentation on why it’s time to make marriage legal for gays and lesbians.

Now, I come from a very conservative background. I grew up thinking the Bible was pretty clear that homosexuality is sinful. As I’ve grown up, though, I (obviously?) have far more gay and lesbian friends and co-workers, and I wonder. It was actually a sermon series on controversial issues in my own church that helped me see maybe the Bible is not so clear on that topic after all.

But this book helps me see intellectually what my heart had already figured out. That we’re calling things sinful that God almost certainly doesn’t call sinful.

I appreciate that Gene Robinson does take a Christian approach. He doesn’t say that God is wrong in this area. He very much feels that gay marriage can be God-honoring.

Usually when I review a book on issues, I present snippets from different arguments. This book does present well-thought out arguments that address most issues I’ve seen presented in, say, Facebook posts against gay marriage. But I don’t want to present sections out of context. When I do that, I often get arguments back, as if the quotation is all there is to say, and can be too easily refuted. Let me just encourage you, if you’re honestly interested in this question, of whether Christians can legitimately support gay marriage, to read this book and give it plenty of thought and prayer. I’m glad I did.

I will simply quote from the bishop’s summing up at the end:

I believe in marriage. I believe it is the crucible in which we come to know most deeply about love. It is in marriage that God’s will for me to love all of humankind gets focused in one person. It is impossible to love humankind if I can’t love one person. That opportunity to love one person and to have that love sanctioned and supported by the culture in which we live is a right denied gay and lesbian people for countless centuries. It’s time to open that opportunity to all of us. Because in the end, God believes in love.

aaknopf.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Vader’s Little Princess, by Jeffrey Brown

Humorous, Nonfiction Review 0

Vader’s Little Princess

by Jeffrey Brown

Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2013. 64 pages.

This book, along with its companion, Darth Vader and Son will make anyone who’s ever seen Star Wars laugh out loud.

The assumption is what it would have been like if Darth Vader had been a real Dad to his kids. This one looks at life with Leia during the rebellious teenage years. The references to the films, twisting them slightly, are hilarious.

It’s all done as comic panels, so the references to the films are visual as well as quotations placed in a new context.

I like the one where Leia knits her dad a “Cozy” for his helmet. He wears it, looking ridiculous, and thinks, “Just tell her you like it.”

Or, referencing the film: Leia’s sitting down at a table with Darth Vader at the head. He says, “SO, WE MEET AT LAST.” She says to Han Solo, sitting next to her, “Behave yourself, or my Dad will totally kill you.”

On a related note, when Han is frozen in carbonite, Leia’s protesting, “You are so mean! All he did was kiss me!”

I love the way Star Wars is so ingrained in our culture, he can write these comics knowing full well that most readers will know exactly which scenes he’s referring to.

Too funny!

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Christianity After Religion, by Diana Butler Bass

Christian, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

Christianity After Religion

The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening

by Diana Butler Bass

HarperOne, 2012. 294 pages.
Starred Review

This is an important book for Christians to read, no matter how they feel about the sociological phenomena happening that the author describes, and whether they agree with her or not.

Here are some segments from her introduction:

Strange as it may seem in this time of cultural anxiety, economic near collapse, terrorist fear, political violence, environmental crisis, and partisan anger, I believe that the United States (and not only the United States) is caught up in the throes of a spiritual awakening, a period of sustained religious and political transformation during which our ways of seeing the world, understanding ourselves, and expressing faith are being, to borrow a phrase, “born again.” Indeed, the shifts around religion contribute to the anxiety, even as anxiety gives rise to new sorts of understandings of God and spiritual life. Fear and confusion signal change. This transformation is what some hope will be a “Great Turning” toward a global community based on shared human connection, dedicated to the care of our planet, committed to justice and equality, that seeks to raise hundreds of millions from poverty, violence, and oppression….

This book is concerned with religion and change — specifically how Christianity, especially Christianity in the United States, is changing and how people are questioning conventional patterns of faith and belief. At the outset, let me be perfectly clear. I do not think it is wise to adapt religions to contemporary tastes willy-nilly. As the gloomy nineteenth-century Anglican dean William Inge once said, “Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widow in the next.” I do, however, think it is exceedingly wise for faithful people to intentionally engage emerging religious questions in order to reform, renew, and reimagine ancient traditions in ways that make sense to contemporary people.

The 1970s were the beginning of the end of older forms of Christianity, and now, decades later, we are witnessing the end of the beginning. What follows is a sustained reflection on how religion has changed in our lifetime — a life lived between the beginning of an end and the end of that beginning — and what that means for Christian faith and practice. Much has changed. Where Chirstianity is now vital, it is not really seen as a “religion” anymore. It is more of a spiritual thing.

She achieves this “sustained reflection.” I read it slowly, so I don’t remember everything she said, but that it all got me thinking. However a couple things stood out:

First, people of all religions and non-religions are talking about and seeking “spirituality.” It’s not so cool to be “religious.” But everyone seems to be after being “spiritual.” Here’s an interesting section about that:

But spirituality is neither vague nor meaningless. Despite a certain linguistic fuzziness, the word “spiritual” is both a critique of institutional religion and a longing for meaningful connection. In a wide variety of guises and forms, spirituality represents an important stage of awakening: the search for new gods. As the old gods (and the institutions that preached, preserved, and protected the old gods) lose credibility, people begin to cast about for new gods — and new stories, new paths, and new understandings to make sense of their new realities. In the process, the old language fails, and people reach for new words to describe the terrain of their experience. “Spirituality” is one such word, an ancient word, to be sure, but a word that is taking on fresh dimensions of meaning in a fluid and pluralistic religious context. To say that one is “spiritual but not religious” or “spiritual and religious” is often a way of saying, “I am dissatisfied with the way things are, and I want to find a new way of connecting with God, my neighbor, and my own life.” It might not be a thoughtless mantra at all — in many cases, it may well be a considered commentary on religious institutions, doctrine, and piety.

Another part I remember is where she talked about how community is more important than ever.

If you want to knit, you find someone who knits to teach you. Go to the local yarn shop and find out when there is a knitting class. Sit in a circle where others will talk to you, show you how to hold the needles, guide your hands, and share their patterns with you. The first step in becoming a knitter is forming a relationship with knitters. The next step is to learn by doing and practice. After you knit for a while, after you have made scarves and hats and mittens, then you start forming ideas about knitting. You might come to think that the experience of knitting makes you a better person, more spiritual, or able to concentrate, gives you a sense of service to others, allows you to demonstrate love and care. You think about what you are doing, how you might do it better. You develop your own way of knitting, your own theory of the craft. You might invent a dazzling new pattern, a new way to make a stitch; you might write a knitting book or become a knitting teacher. In knitting, the process is exactly the reverse of that in church: belonging to a knitting group leads to behaving as a knitter, which leads to believing things about knitting.

Relationships lead to craft, which leads to experiential belief. That is the path to becoming and being someone different. The path of transformation.

It is also the path found in the New Testament; the Way of Jesus that leads to God. Long ago, before the last half millennium, Christians understood that faith was a matter of community first, practices second, and belief as a result of the first two. Our immediate ancestors reversed the order. Now, it is up to us to restore the original order.

As you can see, she draws some conclusions from current trends and reexamines what Christianity should be all about.

A thought-provoking and important book.

dianabutlerbass.com
harperone.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of My Bookstore, edited by Ronald Rice

Musings, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, True Stories 0

My Bookstore

Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop

Introduction by Richard Russo
Edited by Ronald Rice and Booksellers Across America

Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, New York, 2012. 378 pages.
Starred Review

My Bookstore is a delight. I read it slowly, one essay per day. It would be a wonderful project to try to visit all the bookstores mentioned in this book, though it might take a lifetime.

The premise is simple. 82 American authors wrote an essay about their personal favorite independent bookstore. The essays are entertaining and delightful. Some talk about the power of reading, some about community, some about great book recommendations, some about wonderful family times.

Here’s what Richard Russo says in the introduction:

Many people love good bookstores, but writers? We completely lose our heads over them. We tell each other stories about them. We form lifelong, irrational attachments to our favorites….

…to me, bookstores, like my first one, remain places of genuine wonder. They fill me with both pride and humility when I come upon my own books in them. Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world’s longest, best, most thrilling conversation. The people who work in them will tell you who’s saying what. If you ask, they’ll tell you what Richard Russo’s up to in his new one, but more important, they’ll put in your hand something you just have to read, by someone you’ve never heard of, someone just now entering the conversation, who wants to talk to you about things that matter.

If you haven’t been in a good bookstore in a while, the book you now hold in your hand will welcome you, lovingly, home.

By reading this book, you can experience for yourself some of those stories that writers tell.

It seems wrong to have a link to Amazon after this review. However, I’m going to keep it there, but ask that my readers merely use Amazon as a “showroom.” Get the information about the book, current price, length, reader reviews. Then go find an independent bookstore and buy yourself a copy. Even though there’s only one of the stores in this book anywhere near me (and not so very near), I think I need to purchase a copy of this book before my next vacation and then start checking off stores.

It does have a list at the end of the stores by geographic location. This book is a celebration of books and people who love them.

blackdogandlevinthal.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Let Go Now, by Karen Casey

Musings, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

Let Go Now

Embracing Detachment

by Karen Casey

Conari Press, 2010. 232 pages.
Starred Review

I’ve been reading this book, slowly, a little at a time, often pausing to post quotes on Sonderquotes, for more than a year. I started reading it as a library book, but then when it was clear I was going to take ages, and that it is packed with good insights, I purchased my own copy.

There are 200 numbered meditations, with “Pause and reflect” pages after each ten meditations. All of the meditations are about detachment and letting go.

I’m divorced, and I didn’t want to be divorced. It’s been a long time, but it’s still always good to get any and all encouragement to let go of that marriage, to detach. And what do you know, the advice is good in other areas, too. I’m a Mom whose kids are becoming adults. And it turns out that most situations that cause stress can be improved by letting go of something.

Why would you want to detach? I’ll let Karen Casey explain, from the Introduction:

To begin with, I think we have to cultivate our willingness to let go, that is, to detach from the trials and tribulations of our contemporaries if we want to find the quiet peace we long for, a peace that will allow us to truly love, to truly embrace, and to appreciate those who journey with us. In this process, we also give those companions the freedom to grow and to find their own way, thus their own eventual peace too. I don’t think we can come together as loving equals without embracing the willingness to detach.

We live very codependent lives, from my perspective. By this I mean that too many of us let even the whims of others — in our families, our communities, our workplaces, even in other parts of the world — define us, determine how we feel, and then decide what we will do next in many instances. Learning to detach allows us to live the life we were meant to live. By allowing other people’s behavior, good, bad, or disinterested, control us, we miss many opportunities for movement and expression in new directions. The converse is also true: if we attempt to control the other persons on our path, wherever they may reside, keeping them “attached” to us through any means (and most of us are very practiced at this), we immobilize them, thus preventing the growth they deserve and have been prepared for already.

Detachment isn’t easy. If it were, there would be no need for a book offering to help you develop the skills to do it. And it may not have appeared on your radar screen as something you wanted to cultivate prior to picking up this book. As was already noted, we are accustomed to being enmeshed with others, letting our lives be constantly influenced by their behavior. I am not suggesting that this influence is always bad; there are good influences, too, probably everyday. We can and do observe healthy “detached” behavior in some of our friends, and perhaps they showed up on our path to serve as our teachers. It’s not always easy to discern the “good” from the “bad,” however. It’s my intent for the meditations here to illustrate those behaviors we want to mimic and those we don’t.

Rather than give you more inspiring excerpts from the book, I’m going to refer the reader to the many quotations I posted on Sonderquotes. This is a marvelous choice for reading each morning. It will help you go on your way with peace.

womens-spirituality.com
redwheelweiser.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own personal copy, purchased via Amazon.com.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Surviving Survival, by Laurence Gonzales

Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth, True Stories 0

Surviving Survival

The Art and Science of Resilience

by Laurence Gonzales

W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2012. 257 pages.

Surviving Survival looks at people who have survived traumatic experiences — and looks at how they live the rest of their lives afterward.

Your experience of life in the aftermath may be even more dramatic, sometimes more painful, than the experience of survival itself. But it can be beautiful and fulfilling, too, and a more lasting achievement than the survival that began it all. What comes after survival is, after all, the rest of your life.

Many of the people whose stories he tells survived horrific experiences. They range from shark attacks and bear attacks to loss of a child or maiming in war. He tells many, many stories, and they don’t all end happily. I found myself getting depressed when he said he needed to balance it out by showing people who did not overcome!

The author doesn’t sugarcoat what these people lived through and now face every day. He explains why the aftermath is so difficult, and looks at many different strategies that work for these people as they live out the rest of their lives.

This book is mostly fascinating. And though I sincerely hope I will never face trauma at the level of the author’s examples, everybody faces smaller traumas throughout their lives. And the author shows techniques that can help you recover from those traumas and live a fruitful life.

One insight that struck me early on involved my vestibular migraines. I had a stroke a year and a half ago. It was in my cerebellum, the center of balance, and was manifested by the room suddenly spinning. After the stroke, I started getting, for the first time in my life, vestibular migraines. They aren’t headaches, but the mechanism is similar to migraine headaches. But instead of head pain, I get a vague dizziness. And it reminds me of nothing so much as my stroke. And that scares me.

This book explained to me why that’s so, why it’s going to take a long time before that’s not a perfectly normal reaction. Here he’s talking about someone who was shipwrecked and witnessed the deaths of her friends.

Much of what the brain does is unconscious. It works behind the scenes to forge memories of what is dangerous and what is beneficial so that in the future we can respond correctly and automatically. During her crisis, Debbie’s brain was working overtime to map out those memories in preparation for the next assault. In the brain, the cardinal rule is: future equals past; what has happened before will happen again. In response to trauma, the brain encodes protective memories that force you to behave in the future the way you behaved in the past. Any sight, sound, or smell, any fragment of the scene in which you were threatened, can set off that automatic behavior. The trouble was that in all likelihood, Debbie would never again face a similar hazard. It is rare to be shipwrecked…. In other words, Debbie’s natural and normally useful systems for forming important memories were working on a job that had no practical value. Indeed, those systems were working to make her miserable.

And that’s not the only effect of trauma. Laurence Gonzales examines many, many cases, and looks at people with varying degrees of coping. At the end of the book, he summarizes what he’s learned about rising above survival and living well after trauma.

This book is fascinating like a train wreck, but it throws in good insights for living along the way.

wwnorton.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Safe Journey, by Julia Cameron

Christian, Musings, Nonfiction Review, Travel, True Stories 0

Safe Journey

Prayers and Comfort for Frightened Flyers and Other Anxious Souls

by Julia Cameron

Jeremy P. Tarcher (Penguin), 2013. 151 pages.

This is a lovely little book, in paperback and designed to easily fit in a travel bag for airplane reading. I’ve never really been afraid to fly, but Julia Cameron writes in a way that makes her feelings universal, even if you’re not dealing with that particular fear.

She approaches her fear of flying with story. She tells about a memorable flight, telling us her frightened prayers she sent to God, and then the reaction of the two frightened flyers sitting in her row. She talked with one seatmate about praying to overcome her fear — and then he ended up flying back on the same flight as she did!

Once at her destination, she got strategies from friends, like postponing worrying and acting as if. Those strategies, combined with prayer and helping someone else, healed her fear of flying, as demonstrated when she took a third flight to meet her firstborn grandbaby.

The story’s nice, but Julia Cameron’s prayers are inspiring. She tells God how it is and asks for what she needs, simply and directly. Here’s one example:

Dear God, I am frightened.
Please let us find smooth air again.
Get us out of this turbulence.
Thank you for your help.
Amen.

She also intersperses quotations from others about flying and tips for the reader to try. Even though I’m not plagued by a fear of flying, this book was a lovely reminder to trust God about things I was worried about.

juliacameronlive.com
tarcherbooks.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Cold Tangerines, by Shauna Niequist

Christian, Musings, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

Cold Tangerines

Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life

by Shauna Niequist

Zondervan, 2007. 250 pages.
Starred Review

I was surprised to see that Cold Tangerines was written in 2007. I checked it out because it was new to our library. Better late than never!

Cold Tangerines is another book of meditations on the importance of living a grateful life, on all the blessings God embeds in our everyday world.

A lot of her writing doesn’t seem momentous. But that’s fitting, since she’s talking about walking with God in the everyday.

Here’s a representative section at the end:

It’s rebellious, in a way, to choose joy, to choose to dance, to choose to love your life. It’s much easier and much more common to be miserable. But I choose to do what I can do to create hope, to celebrate life, and the act of celebrating connects me back to that life I love. We could just live our normal, day-to-day lives, saving all the good living up for someday, but I think today, just plain today, is worth it. I think it’s our job, each of us, to live each day like it’s a special occasion, because we’ve been given a gift. We get to live in this beautiful world. When I live purposefully and well, when I dance instead of sitting it out, when I let myself laugh hard, when I wear my favorite shoes on a regular Tuesday, that regular Tuesday is better.

Right now, around our house, all the leaves are falling, and there’s no reason that they have to turn electric bright red before they fall, but they do, and I want to live like that. I want to say, “What can I do today that brings more beauty, more energy, more hope?” Because it seems like that’s what God is saying to us, over and over. “What can I do today to remind you again how good this life is? You think the color of the sky is good now, wait till sunset. You think oranges are good? Try a tangerine.” He’s a crazy delightful mad scientist and keeps coming back from the lab with great, unbelievable new things, and it’s a gift. It’s a gift to be a part of it.

I want a life that sizzles and pops and makes me laugh out loud. And I don’t want to get to the end, or to tomorrow, even, and realize that my life is a collection of meetings and pop cans and errands and receipts and dirty dishes. I want to eat cold tangerines and sing loud in the car with the windows open and wear pink shoes and stay up all night laughing and paint my walls the exact color of the sky right now. I want to sleep hard on clean white sheets and throw parties and eat ripe tomatoes and read books so good they make me jump up and down and I want my everyday to make God belly laugh glad that he gave life to someone who loves the gift, who will use it up and wring it out and drag it around like a favorite sweater.

If you like that one, here are more quotes I collected on Sonderquotes.

I believe this stuff with all my heart. But it’s always good to have a reminder. I recommend reading this book slowly, a chapter or so a day, and getting a daily reminder that God is good and life is full of His gifts, even during hard times.

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