Julia Sea

Tiny Beautiful Things

After a pizza induced book buying fest at WORD a few weeks back I wound up with a copy of Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things. I’ve since read it twice and seem to find ways to bring it up in nearly every conversation I have.

It’s not a perfect thing. I wouldn’t read it in a few gulps but rather bursts - before you go to sleep, the waiting room, and when the Q rolls over the bridge.

I loved it. I loved it from the forward when Steve Almond describes the internet as a place where we “shine our buttons in public” and explains what he means when he says, “radical empathy.”

And most of all I loved these parts:

Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering. Many people who appear to you to be old and stupidly saddled down with kids and cars and houses were once every bit as hip and pompous as you.

When you meet a man in the doorway of a Mexican restaurant who later kisses you while explaining that this kiss doesn’t ‘mean anything’ because, much as he likes you, he is not interested in having a relationship with you or anyone right now, just laugh and kiss him back. Your daughter will have his sense of humor. Your son will have his eyes.

[…]

One Christmas at the very beginning of your twenties when your mother gives you a warm coat that she saved for months to buy, don’t look at her skeptically after she tells you she thought the coat was perfect for you. Don’t hold it up and say it’s longer than you like your coats to be and too puffy and possibly even too warm. Your mother will be dead by spring. That coat will be the last gift she gave you. You will regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life.

Say thank you.

- Dear Sugar #64

And

WTF, WTF, WTF? I’m asking this question as it applies to everything every day.

[…]

Ask better questions, sweet pea. The fuck is your life. Answer it.

- Dear Sugar #39

And this

I am not a religious person. I don’t meditate or chant or pray. But lines from poems I love run through my head and they feel holy to me in a way. There’s a poem by Adrienne Rich I first read twenty years ago called “Splittings” that I thought of when I read your letter. The last two lines of the poem are: “I choose to love this time for once / with all my intelligence.” It seemed such a radical thought when I first read those lines when I was twenty-two—that love could rise from our deepest, most reasoned intentions rather than our strongest shadowy doubts. The number of times I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence has run through my head in the past twenty years cannot be counted. There hasn’t been a day when those lines weren’t present for me in ways both conscious and unconscious. You could say I’m devoted to them, even in times when I’ve failed profoundly to live up to their aspirations.

- Dear Sugar #54