Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

by Anne Lamott

It is okay to fear death. Many people who don’t can be a little too pleased with themselves.

I still believe there are only two major female bodies: us, the pears, all butts and thighs, with grievous cellulite; and the women with long legs, who in middle age get big tummies. They hate their tummies, but we pears hate and resent their long legs and think they don’t have any real problems and that they should go the hell away and run around town in their little shorts. (Actually, there are also the naturally thin people, but there are so few naturally thin people that they don’t really matter, and no one likes them anyway.)

What if, no matter what you did or didn’t eat, you’d always weigh exactly what you weigh today, never gaining or being able to lose a pound?

just trying to do a little better, today. That is the secret of life.

this is the body you’re going to have the entire time you are here. The only nourishment that can give a body and soul the feelings we crave is profound self-love and union with that scared part of ourselves.

The opposite of love is the bathroom scale.

The world is too hard as it is without letting tight pants have an opinion on how you are doing, and make it clear that they are disappointed in you.

people like to chirp, “Nothing tastes as good as thin feels,” and this is one of those idiocies a certain kind of rage-filled person likes to say, along with “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.”

The self-respect and peace of mind you long for is not in your weight. It’s within you.

Finding a way to have a relatively safe and healthy relationship with food is hard, and it involves being one’s own very dearest person.

What gives me hope is how three of the sturdier women at my church got healthier by consciously preparing their meals as if they had asked our pastor or me to lunch or dinner.

Family is hard hard hard, a crucible.

The family is the crucible in which these strange entities called identities are formed, who we are and aren’t but agreed to be.

It’s the hardest work we do, forgiving our circumstances, our families, and ourselves.

Why give up these identities? Maybe because they gravely limited and falsified my life. And because they aren’t who I am.

Jesus’ message is that who your family says you are has nothing to do with the truth of your spiritual identity.

The terrible weight of family is that you may love them, but you also know them too intimately, their dark sides, their secrets and lies.

But the willingness to change comes when the pain of staying where you are is too great,

Those old identities keep us so small, and I unconsciously prefer this. It’s safe.

Empathy says: You and I are made of the same lovely, heartbroken, and screwed-up stuff. You are not an object to me right now.

Empathy, a moment’s compassion, seeing that everyone has equal value, even people who have behaved badly, is as magnetic a force as gratitude. It draws people to us, thus giving us the capacity to practice receiving love, the scariest thing of all, and to experience the curiosity of a child.

don’t bank on never. I don’t so much anymore.

almost more than anything, stories hold us together. Stories teach us what is important about life, why we are here and how it is best to behave, and that inside us we have access to treasure, in memories and observations, in imagination.

“Dearest? Here is the secret: You are preapproved.”

Hope springs from that which is right in front of us, which surprises us, and seems to work.

All those years I wished he was the sort of uncle I would miss when he died, and now he is. I will cry and will miss him when he goes, and I am glad. You can’t logically get from where we were to where we are now. I think that is what they mean by grace.

Why did this happen? Why her? Well, because as my friend Karen says, this happens to people, and she is a human.

“Why?” is rarely a useful question in the hope business.

What if we focus on what the bad event brings forth, like new lands and life and starting over, rather than on the fact that people do horrible things like shoot kids?

Notice that it is God who repents, is converted, at the end of the Noah story. God realizes that He or She overreacted, and promises never to do it again.

If God gets to start over, then it’s a free-for-all, even for cowardly lions like me.