Make This the Week (and Month and Year!) You Shift Toward More Peace and Joy. Brianna Wiest Shows Us the Way
Brianna Wiest has cultivated a giant following for her books, which include the global bestsellers 101 Essays that Will Change The Way You Think and The Mountain Is You (and others). Rich in life guidance and self-reflection, Wiest’s writing delivers something needed today: deep, nourishing, soulful wisdom delivered concisely. There are no superfluous words in her work. Every one of Wiest’s sentences is akin to cool water on a scorching day.
In her latest book, The Pivot Year: 365 Days to Become the Person You Truly Want to Be, Wiest extends her talent for depth and brevity. She delivers a meditation for each day of the year in hopes of prompting readers to tap into their inner knowing and make changes toward living authentically and joyfully.
The Sunday Paper sat with Wiest to explore how we can start to change our lives for the better and find the “glimmers,” as she calls them, of beauty and hope.
A CONVERSATION WITH BRIANNA WIEST
In your earlier book 101 Essays that Will Change the Way You Think, you write, "The unspoken line of everything I write is: 'This idea changed my life.' Because ideas are what change lives—and that was the first idea that changed mine." Brianna, how do ideas change our lives?
As you read that I was smiling, thinking how that feels even more true now than it did then. There are always invisible third doors of possibility in the room with you. But if you have not trained your mind to consider or look for them, you miss them. Then your life starts to operate in what seems like a series of either forward motion or dead-ends—and when you reach a dead end, it can feel so hopeless, and you can feel so defeated. So, this is about being in the moment and finding ways; maybe it's through music, art, and movies that reorient your attention for long enough and get you to see the world from a new perspective, with new eyes.
That sentence also comes from when I started asking myself What would be a different way to think about this moment? What purpose or meaning could I find in this experience? When I intentionally focused on that long enough, that way of thinking became habituated. Something that seemed difficult and unnatural to reach at first could become, over time, a default operating system of seeing what that moment is trying to teach me, whether it was compassion or surrender or truth, and how it is trying to show me how beautiful life can be. When I think that way over and over and over, it becomes default, so much so that I start speaking differently and choosing differently. Then, when I start making different choices, I start changing my habits.
When you put enough time and attention into who you are becoming, your life starts to look different because your habits are different. Your habits are different because your actions are different. Your actions are different because your words are different. All of that happens because your thoughts and ideas are different.
Where do you look to help you change your perspective?
Art and poetry have profoundly inspired me, both in my lowest and highest moments. And also in my neutral moments in between. They help me ask, What can I do with where I am and what I have? Then, I take one little step each day. Mary Oliver has been a huge influence on me and so many others. She had an extraordinary way of painting the world. You could go outside and see a flower so differently after you listen to her words. You would see so much awe and wonder in it. Cheryl Strayed also has a way of reframing life's hardest moments as being opportunities to make yourself more full of compassion and more developed as a whole person because of the valleys and the peaks.
In my writing and journaling practice, I often say that everything I've ever done has been a letter to my younger self. I try to take things from the perspective of what I would tell my younger self or what would my 90-year-old self, if I'm able to get there, wish I had done? So, this perspective shift can be found in art, music, books, or something else consumed. It also can be found in these thought exercises that start to change the way that you think, then change the way that you choose, then help you meet the moment differently, and then start moving your life in a different direction.
This brings up the fact that life is filled with deep meaning and beauty, even in the midst of all the noise.
Yes. It's about bringing yourself back to your place of peace. Huxley said, 'There was in me an invincible summer.' To stay connected to your inner inventory, first of all, you must realize that it's there. Then, you must be able to come back to it over and over again and, ideally, live from that place of no matter what is happening outside of or around me, I am at the invisible summer in my core. That will get you through.
You offer ideas and thought exercises in your newest book, The Pivot Year. How can we start to find our invincible summer and "third door of possibility" when we feel overwhelmed?
The first step is to stop seeking. Create enough space to get quiet and still and rest a little. When we have a dysregulated nervous system, and we're in a place of fear, we see the world from the state of our nervous system. When we're regulated and calmer, all of a sudden, things look different than they did before. So, step one is not trying to go from negative to positive. Step one is trying to go from negative to a little less negative and hopefully getting yourself to neutral. Sometimes, neutral is a matter of just disengaging. It's not trying to answer the fear. It's not thinking, I need to have my entire world figured out within the next day. Instead, it's just letting it go, letting the unanswered questions be questions, coming back into the moment, and getting neutral. Once you're feeling a bit more regulated, you start looking for the little glimmers.
It is also important to remember that nothing is too small. If your joy is in your Starbucks coffee in the morning, don't let the world tell you that it's not real, silly, or undeserving. The ritual of a morning coffee brings me so much peace and joy, as it does for so many others. We tend to lose appreciation for these little pockets of the day and we get in our heads and think Well, this is stupid, this is meaningless. But the silver linings reveal themselves when we show up for those little glimmers more and more completely. When we slow down enough to notice, those glimmers can inspire us. We don't have to have these breakthroughs. Most of the time, and I write about this in The Mountain Is You, we need a micro shift. We need to start readjusting our baseline little by little in the right direction and not try to overhaul things all at once because, often, we can boomerang back to a familiar but probably less stable state. So those glimmers, if it's a post you see, something you want to do in your home, or a friend you want to call, are not nothing. Those things are the hooks that start moving you up a step on the ladder of building momentum.
I really believe this: If you cannot find those little pockets of joy, then what is anything else for? Something we think that our greatest happiness is going to come from having the biggest questions answered. But I don't often find that to be true. When one set of questions gets answered, then we have another set. That's life. That's the journey. That's the invitation to grow. We want it to be that way because it means there's a reason to keep walking, exploring, experiencing, opening up, and developing ourselves. But it's not a rush to complete every single thing that comes to us at this moment. Instead of trying to figure out everything right now, what if you focus yourself instead, on one little glimmer, one little thing you love or feel peace in? Because when you start to bring yourself into those places, that's the doorway.
Why is the power of the pause so essential to you?
I love talking about the pause. When we react without conscious consideration to everything, every feeling, and every thought that crosses our mind, we are completely controlled by whatever the breeze blows through that day. We have no inner locus of control. The way we start to regain it is the minute we have that thought, feeling, or experience, as uncomfortable as it is, to find enough courage to pause just for one second. One second. What would get me through practicing my pause, in the beginning, was I would say to myself, If you're going to scream and freak out, take five minutes before you do that. Usually, by the end of the five minutes, I didn't want to scream anymore because something had shifted. The more we can practice pausing then responding and not reacting, that's huge. If the glimmers are how we see the door, then the pause is how we're able to give ourselves the space to walk through it.
Lastly, Brianna, in The Pivot Year you talk about choosing your hard. You write, "It's hard to be in the wrong relationship and it's hard to be in the right one. It's hard to stay the same, and it's hard to change." Will you walk us through this?
Almost every time in my life I tried to choose what was immediately easy, that is when I would slide into the most self-destructive periods or chapters. Almost every time. I would abstain. I would withdraw. I would isolate myself. I would choose what was satiating. I would let my impulses manage me. When we started our time together talking, I said how we need periods in which to deeply rest and re-regulate. That is true. But what is also true is that in the same way our bodies are strengthened from exercise, our minds are strengthened, too. It's called anti-fragility. This means we're not only grown stronger but also deeper and more complete for how we are called to respond to the mountains that we come upon as we're going through our lives, which we all will. These mountains might look different for everyone, but they're all there. We're all human. But often, we get to choose which mountain we want to scale. And when we don't choose our challenges, life has a weird way of choosing them for us. When we don't confront the pain and fear or the vulnerability of putting ourselves out there or trying to connect with someone we care about and instead settle, life still challenges us. Life will find a way of challenging us for being in the wrong relationship and not challenging ourselves by trying to keep up with our wellness in some way, shape, or form, life has a way of challenging the aftermath of that.
What I mean by 'you choose your hard' is you are either going to choose to overcome what is weighing on you and preventing you from living the life you want and are meant to live, or you're going to deal with the hard of getting to the end of your life, looking back, and saying, 'Wow, I wasted the whole thing.' That's the choice. Both are not going to be easy. But know, you're not alone because this is the choice for all of us, whether we realize it or not.
Brianna is the bestselling author of the books 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think, The Mountain Is You, The Pivot Year, and more. Her books have sold over 1 million copies, regularly appear on global bestseller lists, and are currently being translated into 40+ languages. Learn more at briannawiest.com.
