Celebrate Every Day—here’s something fun!

This little cutie is out today!

Is it possible that I have a new book out today and I completely forgot to tell you about it?! I’m a marketing department’s worst nightmare!

In the swirl of both boys’ birthdays and the move and the college application process and fall baseball and a handful of other things that have very much occupied the forefront of our lives and hearts in this season, I have neglected to mention to you that this little project was in the works, and it’s available today!

Celebrate Every Day is a daily reader, meaning there are 60 short readings and a question to consider at the end of each one. A handful of the sections are from Cold Tangerines—my first book, written almost 20 years ago!—and the rest are pieces that haven’t been published anywhere else, some written years ago and some quite recently, including a new introduction that I wrote over the summer.

Here’s how this project came about: a lovely editor at my publishing house reached out and said, “My friends and I read Cold Tangerines in college, and it meant so much to us, and I realize now that that was almost twenty years ago. We think there are lots of people who haven’t read it who would really connect with the themes, and we think the Day Reader format would be a great fit for your writing.”

I felt on one hand elderly and on the other hand really, really honored. I think every writer hopes that their work stands the test of time in some way, that it transcends the moment in which it was written, and it means so much to me that that editor felt that about my first book.

They say every songwriter is writing the same song over and over, that every artist is trying to paint the same thing—that magical something that they see in only their mind’s eye—over and over. I think I agree. I think every one of us who makes things has a central theme, a core message that we’re always circling around, always coming back around to.

This is mine, 100%. I can’t think of a title, actually, that gets at the very heartbeat of what made me become a writer all those years ago more than this one: Celebrate Every Day.

I want to be the kind of person who celebrates every day—every single day. Every quiet day, every crazy day, every in-between plain old day, because the plain old days aren’t actually plain at all, if you know where—or really how—to look.

It’s not about diamonds and peak experiences. It’s about choosing to see that the real stuff, the best stuff isn’t somewhere out there, across the ocean or when we hit a certain milestone or…or…or….

What I mean is that it’s all right here: the way the light comes through the window, the sound of your children laughing together after they’ve been at each other’s throats all day long. It’s the sound of a song you loved in high school, the moon rising on your walk home, the smell of toast first thing in the morning when you’re so tired you can’t think.

It’s this beautiful, awful world, the faces of people we love, books that make us ache, that rubbery-legged feeling after a long hike. It’s all the normal/wonderful stuff of our real lives, and it’s so easy to miss it, waiting for something that seems more spectacular.

And I don’t mean that every day should involve a party hat or fireworks….exactly the opposite, actually. What I’m saying is that I believe in living desperately in love with our lives right here and right now, no party hats or fireworks required. I’m talking about choosing to believe that our everyday lives are shot through with so much beauty and sparkle and hope right in the midst of the very everyday-ness of it, right here and right now.

It’s a funny thing to hold a book that reaches all the way back to the beginning of my writing life. Of course so much has changed from the writer who wrote that first book to the writer I am today. When I wrote Cold Tangerines, I was newly pregnant & then a mom of a newborn—in fact, I was offered a contract to write a book on a Tuesday afternoon, and then on that Thursday morning, I found out I was pregnant with Henry. I learned to be a writer and learned to be a mother, day by day, right at the same time—and now, of course, that baby is eighteen years old.

When I read through Cold Tangerines in order to help select the sections that would be included in this collection, on one hand, the through line is exactly the same: our lives matter. Our days matter. The ordinary moments ARE the extraordinary ones. I felt it with all my heart then, and I feel it with all my heart now.

But also, when I go back and read those words I wrote almost twenty years ago, I can feel so much anxiety, so much pressure—the energy almost vibrating off the page…am I all right? Will I be all right? Am I doing it right?

One of the best things about getting older is that you start asking different questions—instead of “am I doing it right?”, over time you shift a little bit into something more like “does this align with my most deeply-held values?” and “am I listening well to the voice of the spirit and the voice of my own heart?”

For so long I looked outside myself for who to be. I was caught over and over in a struggle between that voice inside my heart and the voices around me. I wanted to be myself, listen to my own voice, live according to my own values and desires, but over and over I abandoned those things in order to please someone else, to impress them, to appease them.

That’s the key difference I see when I look back at those pages—thirty-year-old me was definitely asking for permission, frantically searching the eyes of the crowd for approval. Nearly fifty-year-old me doesn’t get it right all the time, and I definitely do still find myself slipping back into pleasing and asking, but there are more days than not when I’m able to give myself permission to live the way I believe in living and write the way I believe in writing. Looking back at that scared and frantic young writer has made me feel very tenderly toward her, and also really grateful for the years and for the grounding they’ve given me.

By the way, I’m in love with the cover—which any author will tell you is not always the case and doesn’t happen by accident. I’m super grateful to the design team who absolutely nailed the spirit of the book with this cover. I don’t really think about the cover in terms of how it would look in your house, but I know other people do, and I think this one would look lovely on a nightstand, either your own or the one in your guest room…one of my friends, when I stay in her guest room, always has a new stack of books like this, easy to pick up and read just for a few minutes, and I think it’s such a thoughtful touch.

Also, I’ve noticed a recent trend: if someone wants to talk to me about my writing, and that person is, say, under thirty, at some point in the conversation they will say, my mom loves you! That’s another thing that makes me feel a little bit elderly, but also very honored. If you fall into this category, maybe make a note to get a copy for your mom for Christmas. :)

Here’s to loving our plain old regular lives, to looking back tenderly at our younger selves, to the gift of years and what they teach us, and to celebrating the truly extraordinary nature of everyday life.