Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

by Anne Lamott

We have been redeemed and saved by love, even as a few times we have been nearly destroyed, and worse, seen our children nearly destroyed. We are who we love, we are one, and we are autonomous.

Love has bridged the high-rises of despair we were about to fall between. Love has been a penlight in the blackest, bleakest nights. Love has been a wild animal, a poultice, a dinghy, a coat. Love is why we have hope.

There is the absolute hopelessness we face that everyone we love will die, even our newborn granddaughter, even as we trust and know that love will give rise to growth, miracles, and resurrection. Love and goodness and the world’s beauty and humanity are the reasons we have hope. Yet no matter how much we recycle, believe in our Priuses, and abide by our local laws, we see that our beauty is being destroyed, crushed by greed and cruel stupidity. And we also see love and tender hearts carry the day. Fear, against all odds, leads to

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,” and I want to have had dessert.

Write because you have to, because the process brings great satisfaction. Write because you have a story to tell, not because you think publishing will make you the person you always wanted to be.

That is all you need to know—say it, say what happened that seemed worth the telling, or that you don’t want to forget. Stories are when something happened that you didn’t expect, that lead to some deep internal change in yourself or the main character. Tell it. Something happened, both to and inside a person, that we need you to help us see, and if you believe it wasn’t old and boring, I want to hear it. 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.

More than any other sentence I have ever come across, I love Ram Dass’s line that when all is said and done, we are all just walking each other home.

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.

wish good things lasted forever. That would work best for me. But God is a lot more subtle than I am comfortable with. 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. That is how ordinary and accessible God is—meals, TV, visits, laughter, and especially friendship, which made Kelly share with us the things that finally made her feel safe, there in the room upstairs.

“God is love,” we Christians like to remind ourselves, and every act of love highlights God in the world, because love is not just an idea. Love is something alive, living, personal, and true, the creating and nourishing power within life. It is patient, free to all, and it is medicine and food.

The marvelous folksinger Peggy Seeger said once about a cherished friend, “He died, but he is still in my present tense.”