Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

by Anne Lamott

what this means is that it is also an inside job for the few people you love most desperately in the world. We cannot arrange lasting safety or happiness for our most beloved people. They have to find their own ways, their own answers.

Help is the sunny side of control.

You can raise and care for your nearest and dearest the best you can, put them in the best schools, rehab, condo, or memory care, and never, ever give up on their having the best possible life available. But if you do so thinking you can rescue them with your good ideas and your checkbook, or get them to choose a healthy, realistic way of life, that mistake will make both of you much worse than you already are.

“You got to have friends.” We cannot depend solely on spouses to dump on, to share our intimate thoughts with or reveal our deepest truths to. Trust me, they have been through enough just living with us.

An old woman in twelve-step recovery once told me that while there is an elaborate prayer in one of the steps, of turning one’s life and all results over to the care of God, as each person understands God, she and some of the old-timers secretly pray upon waking, “Whatever,” and pray before falling asleep, “Oh, well.”

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. 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.

Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating. When we hate, we can’t operate from our real selves, which is our strength.

I don’t want my life’s ending to be that I was toxic and self-righteous, and I don’t know if my last day here will be next Thursday or in twenty years. Whenever that day comes, I want to be living, insofar as possible, in the Wendell Berry words “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts,”

Thank God my parents exaggerated the danger of death when I was young. It kept me alive, kept me from drowning and getting run over. But now, if I am not careful, this fear keeps me small, cringing. It gets me to check my messages at waterfalls and baseball games. Facing it down got me to visit India. Facing it down let me fall in love at sixty-two. Sixty-two!

Dog love is god love.”

Get out of yourself and become a person for others, while simultaneously practicing radical self-care: maybe have a bite to eat, check in with the sky twice, buy some cute socks, take a nap.

Fundamentalism, in all its forms, is ninety percent of the reason the world is so terrifying. (For the record, three percent is the existence of snakes. Seven percent is general miscellany.)

The love of our dogs and cats is the closest most of us will come to knowing the direct love of God on this side of eternity.

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

Saint John wrote that God is Love, that anytime you experience kindness and generosity, hope, patience and caring, you are in the presence of God. Anytime you express these, you are drawing something I would call God into the world.