Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

by Anne Lamott

We’re doomed, stunned, exhausted, and overcaffeinated.

We can change. People say we can’t, but we do when the stakes or the pain is high enough.

I have known hell, and I have also known love. Love was bigger.

If it is someone else’s problem, you probably don’t have the solution.

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.)

Joy is portable. Joy is a habit, and these days, it can be a radical act.

(In recovery, we call fine “Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional.”)

And there is always nature, her royal self, who offers herself both as a light show and as bread to be eaten. We hang with her as much as possible, because nature really knows how to do it when she is not being mercurial and destroying entire regions.

To pay close attention to and mostly accept your life, inside and out and around your body, is to be halfway home.

To forgive yourselves and others constantly is necessary. Not only is everyone screwed up, but everyone screws up.

Adults rarely have the imagination or energy of children, but we do have one another, and nature, and old black-and-white movies, and the ultimate secret weapon, books.

To fling myself into a book, to be carried away to another world while being at my most grounded, on my butt or in my bed or favorite chair, is literally how I have survived being here at all.

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

The courage to change the things we can means the stuff inside the snow globe, not where it sits on the mantel.

Something that helps is to look at adversaries as people who are helping you do a kind of emotional weight training, Nautilus for your character. They may have been assigned to you, to annoy or exhaust you. They are actually caseworkers.

Writing means you scribble down what you can see on the screen and all around you.

And everything that has happened to you belongs to you. If people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should have behaved better.

Writers save the world—or at any rate, they saved me and everyone I’m close to.

I view death mostly as a significant change of address.

Gratitude is seeing how someone changed your heart and quality of life, helped you become the good parts of the person you are.

Your inside person, your soul, the innermost baby in the nesting doll of you, is close by when you despair about your neck, your failing vision and drive, but your inside person also knows that with myopia, cluelessness, and tiredness comes grace.

“religion is like going out to dinner with friends. Everyone may order something different, but everyone can still sit at the same table.”

Try to do a little better. Try to be nicer to yourself and to your body. That’s all.

For now, just glance out the window at a bird. Those little show-offs with their pure piping song can be the morning’s reset button.

Trees in any forest have a presence, the beauty of the canopy and glimmers of blue sky like puzzle pieces, but they also have a mystical acoustic effect, due to their physical properties, a hush.

But any hush is a hush, and a hush is usually sacred: there are pockets and patches of great cities where you may find an intense example of this phenomenon.