Below is an excerpt from A More Beautiful Way to Live: Nine Practices to Unlearn Habits of Anxiety, Fear, and Urgency by Bethaney Wilksonson. This is one of our book club picks for the summer of 2026. We invite you to buy the book on bookshop.org or your local bookstore, and spend time with us cultivating groundedness, presence, and acceptance to sustain us as we rebuild a just world. See the rest of our summer book club picks here.
Much of modern life draws us into a pace that feels frenetic and into patterns of urgency that create chaos in our souls. It’s as if we are holding hands with anxiety and fear in nearly every part of our lives. It’s the experience of being scattered and untethered— like no matter how many hours we have in a day, they never seem to be the amount we need.
Maybe you’ve felt it before, the sleeplessness and the worry. The perpetual sense that you’re never doing enough. The fear that if you stop moving for even one second, all the good and beautiful things you’re dreaming of may fall apart. Sometimes the chaos manifests as aches in our bodies or as emotional reactivity in our relationships. Sometimes this inner chaos shows up as an inability to rest, to pause, or to take a full, deep breath. Sometimes we know we’re scattered because we can’t seem to focus on a task or even relax our minds when a day’s work is done. I’ve been there. Maybe you’ve been there too.
Maybe this is where you are right now— scattered, untethered, anxious, and afraid. I want you to know there is another way to live.
What Is A More Beautiful Way to Live?
A more beautiful way is a framework for living that is characterized by three elements: being grounded, being present, and receiving and accepting the life you’ve been given.
This way invites you to change not only how you live but also how you think, how you experience time, and how you orient your inner disposition to the world around you.
Being grounded, the first characteristic element of the beautiful way, is the opposite of feeling scattered and untethered. Groundedness is marked by feeling at peace in your life and in your body. When I think of being grounded, my mind goes to the large oak tree standing in my front yard. The oak tree is firmly planted, settled, and at home in the earth. It bends in the wind, loses branches in storms, and drops leaves each fall—but it is largely immovable in the ways that matter most.
Being grounded is waking up in the morning peacefully resolved in your heart and mind about what’s most important to do that day, and mindfully putting your hands to the tasks in front of you. It’s taking a deep breath before a difficult conversation, standing assured in your perspective while graciously honoring the humanity of the person sitting across from you. You know you’re living a more beautiful way when you feel firmly planted, settled, and at home in the earth—even as the storms come and the seasons change.
The second element of this framework for living is being present, which is a mental, emotional, relational, and spiritual experience in which all your energies are held in the here and now. Instead of ruminating on the past or obsessively trying to control the future, you fix your mind and heart on what’s right in front of you. This is a radical act, as technology masterfully draws us out of our present lives and into online worlds being curated for us. If you don’t want to be present in your everyday life, you have a world of distractions at your fingertips.
Living a more beautiful way, however, acknowledges how distraction perpetuates anxiety and fear in our lives and chooses presence instead, even when it’s painful. If this sounds challenging, that’s because it can be. Much of modern living doesn’t make it easy for us to be present, especially for the tough parts of the human condition. My goal is to walk you through practices that will help you be present in your real life, even on the difficult days.
The third defining element of a more beautiful way of living is receiving and accepting your life as it is, as it’s been given. This requires a tremendous amount of trust. If you’re anything like me, you may bristle at this idea, especially if you’re an overachiever who thrives on setting personal goals and accomplishing them. Believe me when I say this element is an ongoing challenge for me. I tend to fight and push and do everything in my power to make my life what I think it should be.
But a more beautiful way of living welcomes life as it unfolds in surprising, challenging, and unexpected ways. It’s about trusting that even the most challenging seasons carry much- needed wisdom in them. Receiving is being open to what your life wants to teach you, and accepting is a practice of surrender and trust. Receiving and accepting your life doesn’t mean you never make changes or adjustments. It means that rather than trying to force and control your life, which often makes for more anxiety, you find peace in the chaos and, as cheesy as it sounds, go with the flow. The insights in this book will teach you how.
This is an excerpt from A More Beautiful Way to Live: Nine Practices to Unlearn Habits of Anxiety, Fear, and Urgency from Brazos Press. (Used by permission. All rights reserved.)
Available Everywhere Now – Order Your Copy Here.
About the book:
Weaving together rich storytelling and wisdom inspired by nature, she shares nine contemplative practices intended to help you:
● cultivate rhythms of rest, healing, and deep connection;
● embrace a slower, gentler, and more life-giving pace;
● unlearn habits of anxiety, fear, and urgency; and
● show up wholeheartedly for what matters most to you.
With a foreword by Kaitlin B. Curtice, this book is an invitation to those longing for a slower, deeper, and more meaningful way to live.
Bethaney Wilkinson is an author, workshop facilitator, and spiritual director rooted in rural middle Georgia, where she lives with her husband Alex and their two dogs, Isla and Bear. She has an MA in theology from Fuller Theological Seminary and a BA in educational studies from Emory University, and is a certified spiritual director through the Parish Resource Center. She is the author of A More Beautiful Way to Live: Nine Practices to Unlearn Habits of Anxiety, Fear, and Urgency and is the pen behind the Substack publication, The Inner Terrain.
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