“I want a life that sizzles and pops and makes me laugh out loud. And I don't want to get to the end, or to tomorrow, even, and realize that my life is a collection of meetings and pop cans and errands and receipts and dirty dishes. I want to eat cold tangerines and sing out loud in the car with the windows open and wear pink shoes and stay up all night laughing and paint my walls the exact color of the sky right now. I want to sleep hard on clean white sheets and throw parties and eat ripe tomatoes and read books so good they make me jump up and down, and I want my everyday to make God belly laugh, glad that he gave life to someone who loves the gift.”
― Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life
When I first happened upon this glorious quote, neither the author nor the book accompanied it. I didn’t know where the quote resided or who said it, but it captivated me immediately. Moments of significance. Moments of importance. Moments of sacred. I desired these moments, craved them, really, and I didn’t feel like myself when I went too long without one. Special. Magical. Significant. I started defining these as “cold tangerines” moments. I plucked those two words out of the section and made them my mantra.
Later I would find out that the phrase “cold tangerines” must have stuck out to the author, too, because that’s what she titled the book where this phrase is found. I fell in love with this book. I read it several times and tried to convince as many people I could to read it, too. Let’s live cold tangerines! I’d say. I watched closely for these sacred moments and pointed them out to anyone who would listen.
Pitching a tent in the backyard with friends. Watching fireworks from the top of a parking garage. Going around the campfire on New Years Eve, each sharing their biggest hope for the coming year. Trying on my wedding gown for my roommate, twirling barefoot on the hardwood floor. Standing around the piano singing popular songs with friends, each person in a different key. Decorating a Christmas tree. Cold tangerines. A symbol for significant, powerful feelings on insignificant, average days. A signal that something sacred was happening, even when it wasn’t really supposed to. This is cold tangerines! I’d say proudly. Right now is special! Right now is significant! We’re doing it! We’re living significant lives!
But the significance sort of drifts away sometimes. And right when you really need the cold tangerines, you can’t see them anymore.
I had been married for about a year. I sat on the couch, in tears, trying to assign words to the aching in chest. Everything about my life felt so hopelessly ordinary. I went to school. I went to work. I went to church. All the days ran together in a blur of mediocrity that no longer satisfied me. I wanted to be enchanted by life. And nothing felt enchanting right now.
I wanted my life to be something special. I wanted it to feel magical. I was obsessed with achieving a life that feels significant because if life doesn’t feel significant, then I don’t feel significant.
I want cold tangerines, I cried. I want things to feel special. I want to be special. What do I do, God? How do I get the cold tangerines?
He spoke then. Not loudly, but not in a whisper either. A firm and gentle word. I am the cold tangerines, he said.
I wish I could say that in a moment, it was all very clear to me. But that isn’t usually how it goes with me when God speaks. Usually I have to let it swirl around in my mind for a while before I can actually catch onto any understanding. But in time, I have begun to understand.
He is the cold tangerines. Because cold tangerines is beauty. And he is responsible for every ounce of beauty we see. Cold tangerines is connection. All hope for connection is in him. Cold tangerines is comfort. Comfort is his. It’s all his.
Cold tangerines isn’t really something that lucky people find, but rather an awareness of what is already there. It is an awareness of him. We can find significance in moments that seem ordinary because we are aware of the one from where all beauty and all significance arises.
Earlier this year, my husband and I were driving to a nearby town to celebrate my dad’s birthday with friends and family. Along the way, we passed a field of yellow wild flowers. I started crying. Not like misty-eyed and elegant kind of crying. I had full-on, fat tears streaming down my face, as well as some snot. The marvel of it captivated me so. I thought it was so glorious, this field. Can you believe that? I said, searching desperately for a napkin in the glovebox to mop my face. That vast, shining, field of glory was for my delight. And maybe a field of flowers is not something worth crying over to most people, but when I see things that I find that glorious, I am reminded that there is a God who loves me enough to reveal his glory to me.
I try to watch for the cold tangerines. I recently got a tattoo of a small tangerine, to remind me to be aware of them. Of him. The more awareness I cultivate for his love, the more significant everything seems. And as I root my own significance in my belonging to him, the cold tangerines seem to follow me wherever I go.
-em
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