Name: Tiny Beautiful Things
Rating: 4.1 (304 reviews)
Author: Cheryl Strayed

What’s in it for me? Find the hidden beauty in life.

Do you ever find yourself feeling lost in life? Searching for answers at every turn, only to find a new question in your way as soon as you’ve managed to answer the last?

If so, you’re not alone. And if you said no, then perhaps you need to think about it for a little bit longer.

The truth is that no one has just the right answers. Not this Blink, not any book, no one. The reality is that instead of answers, we really only have our own experiences to share and the advice that others can give us.

Cheryl Strayed, the author of Tiny Beautiful Things, thoughtfully constructed this part memoir, part advice column based on her “Dear Sugar" advice column to help us find the beauty in places that we wouldn’t normally expect it to be. She admits that her advice isn’t based “necessarily on the right-wrong continuum” but that there should be a variety of factors that go into making appropriate decisions in life. And what are those? Well, they include self-realization, acceptance, forgiveness, and resilience. desperation, and redemption.

In this Blink, we’ll take you through some of the most important key insights of these factors to discuss the difficulties and beauty of the different stages of our lives.

And with that, let’s dive in.

Acceptance of Life and Death

Questions surrounding life and death can either be very broad or very specific. It’s easy to wonder when you’ll die, how you’ll die, or whether it’ll be painful. But these aren’t the kinds of questions that the author Cheryl Strayed chooses to dwell on.

She focuses on stories with harrowing questions full of substance, pain, desperation, and beauty. Depression and grieving were common themes throughout her column.

When we’re depressed or grieving, it often feels like there’s no way out. We feel ashamed and hide ourselves from the world. But Strayed emphasizes that while difficult, we need to be open about how we’re feeling. We need to talk to others and tell them that we’re not okay and that we’re struggling.

One gentleman seeking advice described being stuck in his own personal hell following the death of his son, who’d been killed by a drunk driver some years earlier. He expressed his regrets about things he could have said or done differently – something we’re all guilty of feeling when a loved one passes. He wondered how on earth he could move on.

The reality was that he’d already started to move on and that he’ll continue to do so. Moving on doesn’t mean forgetting, it means finding your inner healing place.

Healing is a different process for everyone. The most important thing you can do is carry on the memory of your loved ones in whatever way you can.

Most people struggling with depression or the process of grieving describe feeling lost. What they don’t realize is how much hope they truly have. The first sign of hope is that they’re reaching out for help. They want to heal, they just don’t know how to.

The first step is usually acceptance. And acceptance is of major importance in this next story.

A woman who wrote to Strayed lived in constant fear that she’d end up diagnosed with cancer. It was a common disease in her family. She’d lost her father to liver cancer, her grandmother to a brain tumor, and while her mother survived her battle with breast cancer, it essentially broke her.

This woman called herself “Scared of the Future.” She was thinking much too heavily about this aspect of life because she was too afraid she’d become ill. She wondered how she could plan for her future when her future wasn’t guaranteed.

It’s important to realize that none of our futures are guaranteed whether we’re ill or not. If we want to learn how to live, we have to accept that.

At the same time, it’s completely normal to question your future. It makes it difficult not to when you have a voice in your head that likes to control you.

Strayed’s advice to anyone dealing with this kind of dilemma is that fear should never overpower your ability to be rational about your own mortality. The more you tell yourself that your future is doomed, the more you’re robbing yourself of the life that you truly deserve.

A lot of key messages concerning life, death, grieving, and healing are the same. They all take some sort of acceptance.

In our first example, the father had to accept that his son is no longer alive and that he has to find a way to continue on without him. Things won’t get better without your loved ones, but coping with their loss will get easier.

For this father, and for anyone who has lost a loved one, it’s the opportunity of having known that person and carrying on their memory that should give us reason enough to keep moving forward.

Love and Realization

We spend a huge portion of our lives realizing who we are, who others are, and what is in or out of our control.

The thing about life is that we constantly have expectations. We make the mistake of having too many expectations for ourselves and for others. But we can’t control what others do or say. What we can control though, are our decisions.

Forgiveness at Heart

Forgiveness is often difficult. And often we’re faced with a dilemma. You can likely recall a time in your life when you debated whether or not to forgive someone for doing something. Or perhaps it was you who was debating asking someone else for their forgiveness.

Stayed says there are three common themes of forgiveness: forgiving yourself, forgiving others, and asking for forgiveness. Most people who wrote to her wondered whether they should offer someone else forgiveness. Plenty of those people were daughters regarding their fathers. Here’s just one example.

Key ideas in Tiny Beautiful Things

About the Author

Cheryl Strayed is a New York Times best-selling author who earned her calling as an advice columnist with the Rumpus. Her other titles include Wild, Torch, and Brave Enough. She’s also hosted two podcasts Sugar Calling and Dear Sugar, and her essays and short stories have been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and several magazines.