Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

by Anne Lamott

Don’t be an asshole, and try to remember people’s names, especially those people with no power or cachet, and seek beauty through binoculars, books, records.

Over the decades, when it hasn’t been this thought, it’s been the one where I idly whip the steering wheel of the car and plow into a tree or big rig.

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.

All truth is paradox. Everything true in the world has innate contradictions.

Almost every facet of my meager maturation and spiritual understanding has sprung from hurt, loss, and disaster.

Niels Bohr wrote, “The opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth.”

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.

I have a list of excellent ideas on how almost everyone I know should proceed in order to improve the quality of their lives, which might coincidentally improve the quality of mine, as I could stop worrying about their bad choices and wasted potential.

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?

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.

While you might think it’s a trick, having affection for one’s goofy, crabby, annoying, lovely self is 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.

Some of us periodically need to repeat the joy training, rehabilitate the part of us that naturally dims or gets injured by busyness, or just by too much bad news to bear.

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

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.

Something that helps is to look at adversaries as people who are helping you do a kind of emotional weight training,

My kids know that they get to ask people to read their stories and help make them better, while my grown-up students have forgotten this, how much help we need, deserve, and can ask for. My grown-ups know that if you are a writer, everything that happens is grist for the writing mill, for transformation, and just as important, for revenge. Also, you will have great stories and details to heap into your subconscious mind’s buckboard, for later literary use or blackmail.

Writers save the world—or at any rate, they saved me and everyone I’m close to. When we were small, they were our travel guides and companions in the great mysteries of life and family. They were mirrors, mentors, guide dogs. They helped me laugh about terrifying and isolating things, and made me question my very reason for existence, as well as my fears, prejudices, and illusions. They helped free me from hubris, and thus tunnel vision. They helped heal my pain, in giving me people I recognized, humans as screwed up and narcissistic and dear as I was, whom I was able to respect and enjoy, who had scary and/or profound experiences and discovered courage and grace that maybe I could find, too.

It’s ridiculous how hard life is. Denial and avoidance are unsuccessful strategies, but truth and awareness mend. Writing, creation, and stories are food.

People are little truth-seeking missiles, but not many of us were encouraged to challenge our convictions and identities, except by writers and certain teachers, so we extracted meaning by selecting certain variables that agreed with our parents’ worldview.

Second, the more time you spend in the presence of death, the less you fear it. Your life will be greatly enhanced by spending time with dying people, even though you’ve been taught to avoid doing so.

Most of my spiritual breakthroughs have been against my will.

Your inside person does not have an age. It is all the ages you have ever been and the age you are at this very moment.

Go do some anonymous things for lonely people, give a few bucks to every poor person you see, return phone calls. 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.

Hope and peace have to include acceptance of a certain impermanence to everything, of the certain obliteration of all we love, beauty and light and huge marred love. There is the wonder of the ethereal, the quantum and at the same time the umbilical. Don’t call it God if that lessens it for you. Call it Ed. Call it Shalom. The Quakers, who are not as awful as most other Christians, call it the light.

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

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

What linked us all was what didn’t work, because that is what got everyone’s attention.

Bob Ross on his show The Joy of Painting reminding us that when we make big mistakes on canvas, we can turn them into birds—“Yeah, they’re birds now!”