How to live a remarkable life.

My mama always told me to live sideways. She never said those words exactly, but she showed me with the way she ambled through meadows and rambling, long, drawn-out conversations and fed the birds and walked strong, shoulders square. How she drank her coffee black and planted lavender and oak trees and wasn't afraid of the spiders or the dusk. She preached it with her brimming confidence and Chanel N°5 and hair pulled back in a hot kitchen while canning plums. My mother embodied sideways living for my entire childhood. I owe her everything for that. 

Some of the best things I've learned are the things my mother never said to me but always meant. 

My mama always told me to live sideways. 

Not a lot of people get that. It's not something that's written like a map on your bones. It's a subtle, simple thing, and you have to learn it. If no one ever taught you to live horizontally, the thought of it probably even causes your heart to clench, at a least a little bit. 

Surprisingly, it's the people who you would most likely expect to live vertically who understand best how to live sideways. Maybe it's because they have everything and realize that they really don't. Or maybe it's because of a sunrise that they should have missed but didn't. Or maybe their mama never told them either but she showed them too. I don't know. All I really know is Johnny Cash had it right when he was asked what paradise was and he replied,

"This morning, with her, having coffee." 

Most of our lives we're told that success and victory will only come if you live vertically, but that's a lie, and that lie leads to an unremarkable life. History tells a different story. The people who dared to live in the dirt, the ones who slowed down, those who chose to stop climbing mountains and instead began to push them aside, the people who dared to wave banners or stand instead of sit, those are the most remarkable people. Those are the people whose stories that you read make your spirit swoon and poetry suddenly makes sense. 

G. K. Chesterton once wrote that "...we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure." Many of us–myself included at times–have been negligent of this pursuit. We become so wrapped up in the secure, that we dismiss the strange as completely and unequivocally unnecessary. We forget wonder, and we forget how to slow down. See, we have mistaken the rush and necessity of success in this life for the secure, but it isn't really. It's the small satisfaction you get from welcoming simple moments into your life. It's the pleasure of the raw. It's a life lived looking and noticing through rose-colored glasses. And we have written the strange off as too strange, as foreign or daring, but once you recognize the strange for what it really is, you understand that it is not meant to make you quake in your boots always but rather only to lead an adventurous existence daily and with a spirit of jubilee. The strange is the way things shift, the growth that spills out of the constancy of someone's life. It's not always brave and courageous and dangerous or snapping and biting. Yes, sometimes the strange is a sunset in Budapest instead of Alabama, and sometimes the strange is simply the arrival of the dusk.

Sideways living is a romantic insistence; it's the welcome embrace of the familiar and the dare of the unfamiliar.

This past year was maybe the hardest of my life. 

Things happened that I didn't want to happen, things that I never dreamed could or would happen to those that I love. The month of February almost killed me. I still remember quite clearly a week of coming home from classes and laying on the cold floors of my dark house and just sobbing, weeping the hardest I had ever wept in my life. 

There was this one day when I couldn't catch my breath.

I panicked. I gave up. It was a dark day, and I sat on my kitchen floor next to a cup full of tea that wasn't even warm anymore and I shouted up to Christ. I told Him that He had abandoned me, and I got so frustrated and sobbed so hard that I began to hyperventilate. I learned to be angry at God this year, in a way I didn't think I could. Truthfully, I felt like He ripped my heart out of my chest, and I thought He did it on purpose. And with that thought came months of grey and despair and restlessness, and finally a silver lining.
But then October arrived, and I felt as if everything constant and sure in my life had been snatched from me in a moment, a decision, and a choice. I found myself wavering and not knowing who to turn to because I was trying to be the shoulder again, but I was just as weak. And there I was again, in that bleariness and bleakness. I stood by the river one morning, and threw handfuls of stones and dirt into the water while I breathed loudly in desperation and hurt. I felt abandoned, and I wanted to blame the Maker. Philippians didn't say what I wanted it to, and I didn't even know how to say what I wanted it to. Honestly, I'm still standing in the wake of October and her harshness. I was sitting in a new pastor's front room with my family on Christmas Eve, and I looked around me and thought, How did I get here? From what I had, to here. How did this happen? How is the one thing I never thought I would lose gone?
And I still don't know the answer to that.

I learned what hopelessness is this year. 

I learned what it is like to be deserted. 

I'm going to tell you one of the hardest truths I've learned. 

Living a remarkable life hurts. 

There is safety and certainty in vertical living. If you're always going up or going forwards, direction is so evident. Most people don't even need a compass, where they're going is incredibly clear to them. Their path is marked, and it is marked well. Because people tell you what to do when you live vertically; they even tell you who to be. And dismissing those around you who may have been dealt a lesser hand in life is a little bit easier. It's less risky to ignore the less fortunate when you live vertically.

I chose to be like Christian, in "The Pilgrim's Progress," this year. Part of me knew when I decided that, that I would regret it, at least a little. And I do. And I don't. Christian turns away from and loses almost everything, but he also gains even more.

The things that have been taken from me and my loved ones this year are things I never for a second thought would be lost. Yet they were. It's December, and the impossible became possible this year. 

It's because I am choosing to live sideways. I understand that all of these tragedies and hardships are consequences of a horizontal life, because a vertical life is an apathetic life, and when you don't really bother to care, hardly anything hurts. But when you live sideways, when you actually stop, take a step back, look around, and breathe, then pain arrives. It's almost like you're inviting him in. You tell him, I decided! I decided to care! Come get me. And he does. 

And he almost kills you.

But still you wake up. Because with tragedy comes the promise of redemption. I know that's what 2015 will be for me, a redemption year. Because after Christian goes through the valley of the shadow of death, a new day comes when the sun rises and he meets Faithful. You have no idea how much I want that redemption, how hard I yearn for that faith, how many times I have repeated to myself, 

Come January, please come. 

I have been home for December. The other day, I went and sat outside, up against the shop wall, in the cold and with a steaming mug of black coffee beside me. I was writing in my journal. I had planned to write a lot actually, but the only words I put on the page were these: "Not everything lasts forever, and that is okay." And then I leaned my head back and looked up at the white sky and breathed. Because I was still alive. I had that day. I had purpose, and I still do. I chose to live sideways in that moment, not behind in the past and my loss and regrets, and not forward into the worries and cares of my future, but then. Right then. In the welcoming presence of my childhood home and the unknown that will come about in this next year, and in everything surrounding that.
I heard the late geese migrating.
I watched the steam float above my coffee cup.
I felt small wooden splinters digging into my hand.
I noticed the frost on the dead grass.
I recited Keats and Ecclesiastes under my breath.
I pulled my sweater tighter around me, and felt tininess and largeness.
I dwelt in the presence of my Maker, and the closeness of my family.
I lived, I lived, I lived.

I lived, I lived, I lived.

Yes, this last year has been a hard one. There has been many a time when I felt like Bilbo, and wanted only to crawl back into the safety of my hobbit hole, into the warm yellow light of vertical living, but I didn't. Instead, I kept on the path, journeying sideways with the magic and the beasts and the humans about me. Learning, discovering, bleeding, finding, losing, battling. Loving. Because sideways living requires loving, and as C. S. Lewis said, "To love at all is to be vulnerable." But it's worth it. I swear it's worth it. I would know.

So slow down. Breathe a little deeper. Dare harder. Drink more coffee, and very well make it black. Drive miles. Battle battles. Remain. Wake up. Show up for people, even startle them. Read Jude, and read it again, and again. Walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Go, and stay, be an hundred different places in heart, mind, and soul, but choose to be fully present more often than not. Laugh. Weep. Grow and shift, embrace the changes. Discover Christ and allow Him to discover you, intimately and in a real manner. Pursue people. Build a home. See the world. Think outside of yourself for once. Give, give, give.
Be "as kind as summer."
Live remarkably.
Love.