Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

by Anne Lamott

I am stockpiling antibiotics for the apocalypse, even as I await the blossoming of paperwhites on the windowsill in the kitchen.

Didn’t this strike you as very strange given where we are right now- this, as the opening line in the book

We have also known the abyss of love lost to death or rejection, and that it somehow leads to new life.

This is something I have been struggling with - I know the abyss but not seeing a way out of it

Love is why we have hope.

So why have some of us felt like jumping off tall buildings ever since we can remember, even those of us who do not struggle with clinical depression? Why have we repeatedly imagined turning the wheels of our cars into oncoming trucks? We just do. To me, this is very natural. It is hard here.

It is comforting to know that this is not unique to me— but what does it really me- are we all just a step away from oblivion?

We can change. People say we can’t, but we do when the stakes or the pain is high enough. And when we do, life can change. It offers more of itself when we agree to give up our busyness.

This is reminiscent of Eckert Tolley and the distinction that he makes between inner and outer - or spirit and form - this too makes me so uneasy - again like that dream that you can almost remember

Paradox means you have to be able to keep two wildly different ideas in your head at the same time. This

Again, referencing our leader - thought it before I even read the line about our leaders- women seem to be better at this than men - my bias

is one too many for some people, including me on bad days, and sometimes our fearless leaders.

But all truth really is paradox, and this turns out to be a reason for hope. If you arrive at a place in life that is miserable, it will change, and something else about it will also be true. So paradox is an invitation to go deeper into life, to see a bigger screen, instead of the nice, safe lower left quadrant where you see work, home,

Spirit and form

and the country.

Try a wider reality, through curiosity, awareness, and breath. Try actually being here. What a concept.

This is the challenge to move away from our obsession with form to a place of spirituality

Each of us wants so much assurance, and there really isn’t much. We religious types think God’s love, closeness, and grace are the answers to all of life’s pain and general horribleness. But then something bad happens to our children or our health.

It was confusing and moving quickly away from the conversation focusing on self and got into that whole child thing -not that it is not important and relevant- but I needed to go deeper into the personal spirituality-

Every day we’re in the grip of the impossible conundrum: the truth that it’s over in a blink, and we may be near the end, and that we have to live as if it’s going to be okay, no matter what.

Some characters in fiction and our families exist as levers, to turn everything upside down and thereby knock out of the park some of our old presumptions, pretensions, convictions, and illusions of safety.

But what comes in is fresh air on our skin, which startles us awake. We’ll never again be as open and vibrational as babies, but maybe now we’ll be a little more present and aware.

When we detach or are detached by tragedy or choice from the tendrils of identity, unexpected elements feed us.

We remember that because truth is paradox, something

beautiful is also going on.

we do the next right thing. We te...

we can take one loud, sucking, disengaging step back into hope.

We do the smallest, realest, most human things. We water that which is dry.

The most powerful of statements

The desperate drive to own and control in order to fill our psychic holes, relieve anxiety, fix difficulties,

and cauterize old wounds takes root at an early age, and is doomed. It is like going to the hardware store

Psychic wounds from childhood

Maybe retracing our steps to the origin of the problem is helpful.

The message to us kids was that we didn’t have intrinsic value but we could earn it, and that we lived in a world of scarcity but just needed new things.

This is painfully relevant - on the surface you don’t have the abusive- blatant abusive childhood but the message of responsible for their happiness and need to be perfect - for them - shaped a lot of my paradigms

Two tactics helped. Putting together a reasonably good personality was how we staked a claim on the outside world, although it meant ignoring our inside world.

And the other tactic was to achieve enough to hoard better and

better stuff that most people couldn’t even afford.

Wow

The bakery, on the other hand, was a family’s understanding that a kid didn’t have to do or achieve or own anything more for the world to care, and even delight in her.

I did know - very few- and do know more now- adults who parent this way- live the imagery of the bakery

Besides extreme achievement, basic jungle-survival growing up meant agreeing not to see what was going on in the family but also agreeing to feel responsible for the parents’ unhappiness.

Even so, after finding those friends and those poems, and maybe even coming to believe that the world is tilted to the good, our default response still is the child’s drive to be more accomplished, to be attractive and self-sufficient, with a better class of friends.

A child said to me, “I has value,” but the grown-ups mostly keep that thought to themselves, and I keep forgetting that I do.

This idea that I had all the value I’d ever need was concealed from me my whole life.

I cannot add to the value of myself. It’s not out there.

This poses the question: If it’s not out there for sale or to achieve, then where is it? It’s everywhere, within and without, around and above, in the most ordinary and trivial, in bread and roses, a glass of water, in dawn and midnight.

Explore this

All you have to do is want to see.

It’s all here, everything we seek and need, inside us.

Help is the sunny side of control.

From an early age in chaotic, confusing families, another survival instinct was to try to get more information about everything, especially about how all the adults were doing, and how things were going to turn out. (This is still my first response to deep anxiety.)

Me in this pandemic

Jung wrote that when we look outside ourselves, we dream. When we look inside, we wake up. Why would you walk out of a lovely dream, or Plato’s cave, into real life?

Spirit and form

My brother was there, I could tell, and I thought he needed a beer. Nor did I know about grace, that it meets you exactly where you are, at your most pathetic and hopeless, and it loads you into its wheelbarrow and then tips you out somewhere else in ever so slightly better shape.

I got right with my own sense of God, and eventually I became a recovering higher power. I got on with my own life, which is blessed beyond words and sometimes frustrating.

This is how most of us are—stripped down to the bone, living

along a thin sliver of what we can bear and control, until life or a friend or disaster nudges us into baby steps of expansion. We’re all both irritating and a comfort, our insides both hard and gentle, our hearts both atrophied and pure.

P. 58 we all scrape by but a crisis can give us a nudge and we begin taking baby steps in another direction - although my first reaction was “do” something - upon greater reflection for me this crisis has made me go inward - I don’t always like what I find but inward I go.

But with antibiotics and technology came great expectations, of being able to keep our children safe, of living long and healthy lives, relaxed and content and able to keep up the car payments. Even with

What a commentary on the current world condition

the Internet, deciphering the genetic code, and great advances in immunotherapy, life is frequently confusing at best, and guaranteed to be hard and weird and sad at times. These days things are about as mortally coiled as they can be, our young as vulnerable as chicks, our old just as stunningly decrepit as in medieval times but now living forever.

And running through it all there is the jangle, both the machines outside and the chattering treeful of monkeys inside us.

How can we know all this, yet somehow experience joy? Because that’s how we’re designed—for awareness and curiosity.

Some of us periodically need to repeat the joy training, rehabilitate the part of us that naturally dims or gets injured by busyness, or just by too much bad news to bear.

What other than books is inside me or nearby that can help connect with what has meaning?

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.