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We’re doomed, stunned, exhausted, and overcaffeinated. And yet, outside my window, yellow roses bloom, and little kids horse around, making a joyous racket.
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.
It is hard here.
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.
Fear, against all odds, leads to community, to bravery and right action, and these give us hope.
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.
I don’t actually know that a deeper reality exists, but I believe that it does, and at least I know to pay attention to the light.
Life is taxing enough at its most predictable, but you can’t bank on anything.
The paradox is that both of these are true and they’re both true at the same time.
Paradox means you have to be able to keep two wildly different ideas in your head at the same time.
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, and the country. Try a wider reality, through curiosity, awareness, and breath. Try actually being here. What a concept.
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.
When we are stuck in our convictions and personas, we enter into the disease of having good ideas and being right.
It is the worst thing on earth, this truth about how little truth we know. I hate and resent it. And yet it is where new life rises from.
Don’t get me wrong—it sucked. I believe I would grieve and wail forever if this happened to me. But I would be mistaken. I would come through, via friends, community, love, grace, relief efforts. We are flattened, we come through.
Scientists say we are made of stars, and I believe them, although my upper arms look like hell. Maybe someday the stars will reabsorb me. Maybe, as fundamentalist Christians have shared with me, I will rot in hell for all eternity, which I would hate, because I am very sensitive.
We remember that because truth is paradox, something beautiful is also going on. So while trusting that and waiting for revelation, we do the next right thing. We tell the truth. We march, make dinner, have rummage sales to raise relief funds.
There is almost nothing outside you that will help in any kind of lasting way, unless you are waiting for a donor organ. You can’t buy, achieve, or date serenity. Peace of mind is an inside job, unrelated to fame, fortune, or whether your partner loves you. Horribly, 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.
If it is someone else’s problem, you probably don’t have the solution.
Most emotional wounds are caused by a child’s belief or feedback that he is deficient, defective, or annoying—probably all three.
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. We were simultaneously disappointing and better than people in other families. Evil outweighed good, scarcity outweighed care and abundance. So stay on your toes, but why, for Chrissakes, are you such a nervous Nellie?
When my perfect dog Sadie died fifteen years ago, I bought the first new car of my life a week later, a soft minty-green VW bug. God told me to, and it helped for a few days. When a large newspaper’s book critic panned my previous book, saying it seemed to have been written by someone who was spending too much time with the Kardashians, I felt humiliated. The paper has 500,000 readers. How to deal with this? A Cinnabon is a thing of perfection, and the extra frosting costs only 71 cents.
Sounds like me
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. Could you say this about yourself right now, that you have immense and intrinsic value, at your current weight and income level, while waiting to hear if you got the job or didn’t, or sold your book or didn’t?
This idea that I had all the value I’d ever need was concealed from me my whole life. I want a refund.
Love this quote
I absolutely don’t buy into the current mania for tidiness and decluttering. For a writer, piles of papers and notes are a fertile field. Keep all those books you read in college, or had certainly meant to read. Keep all those clothes that last fit during the Carter administration. Or give them away. It’s for you to choose. You has value.
Everyone else has value, too.
They has value, as they are, whether heroic or appalling.
The harm is in the unwanted help or helping them when they need to figure things out for themselves. Help is the sunny side of control.
There is nothing outside them, nothing they can date, buy, or achieve, that will fill the hole inside them or help them hit the reset button. But it’s very productive of you to try, and try, and try, although they tend to get sicker, as do you. Plus, they start to hate you. So there’s that.
Good stuff
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.) We needed to figure things out. This would surely make things less worrisome.
My lifelong and core belief, right after the conviction that I was defective, mildly annoying, and better than everyone else, was that my help was helpful.
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.
Almost everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, scared, and yet designed for joy. Even (or especially) people who seem to have it more or less together are more like the rest of us than you would believe.
Joy is always a surprise, and often a decision.
Joy is a habit, and these days, it can be a radical act.
To pay close attention to and mostly accept your life, inside and out and around your body, is to be halfway home.
The lesson here is that there is no fix. There is, however, forgiveness. To forgive yourselves and others constantly is necessary. Not only is everyone screwed up, but everyone screws up.
We are hardwired with curiosity inside us, because life knew that this would keep us going even in bad sailing.
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. Someone else is doing the living for me, and all I have to do is let their stories, humor, knowledge, and images—some of which I’ll never forget—flow through me, even as I forget to turn off the car when I arrive at my destination.
Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.
he was deteriorating faster than he could lower his standards,
we are fused with people when we hate them. We’re not us anymore. We become like them.
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. Now that I think of it, this is such a great reason to give up our hate—as revenge, to deprive the haters of what they want.
look at adversaries as people who are helping you do a kind of emotional weight training,
Make me a channel of Thy peace, that where there is hatred, let me sow love, or at least not fertilize the hate with my dainty bullshit.
So, writing. What a bitch.
Writing almost always goes badly for everyone, except for Joyce Carol Oates.
If you do stick with writing, you will get better and better, and you can start to learn the important lessons: who you really are, and how all of us can live in the face of death, and how important it is to pay much better attention to life, moment by moment, which is why you are here.
It’s never, ever, ever good enough until you learn it’s good enough.
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.
