Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

by Anne Lamott

A role model isn’t a mentor. Life gave me mentors, though—poetry, pastors, the women’s movement, naturalists, and friends—who helped me come to know several truths of which I am almost sure.

I have had a spiritual mentor named Bonnie for three decades now, who loves me and trusts God and Goodness so crazily that I sometimes think of her as Horrible Bonnie, because I cannot get her to judge me or abandon hope. For thirty years, she has answered all of my distressed or deeply annoyed phone calls by saying, “Hello, Dearest. I’m so glad it’s you!” I’ve come to believe that this is how God feels when I pray, even at my least attractive.

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.

She courted joy and gratitude, and meditated,

Light not only warms, of course, but illuminates both things we want to see and don’t want to see.

All truth is paradox. Everything true in the world has innate contradictions. “I know one thing, that I know nothing,” Socrates said.

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

Paradox means you have to be able to keep two wildly different ideas in your head at the same time.

But truth is too wild and complex to be contained in one answer, so Jesus often responded with a question or a parable.

Most parables are paradoxical in that they don’t go the ways you think they will. Jesus is messing with people’s minds, paradoxically out of love, so they dig deeper into truth, where they may find themselves, and love, which is the kingdom.

We are consumed by the most intense love for one another and the joy of living, along with the grief and terror that we and our babies will know unbelievable hurt:

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.”

We think we know what we know, and we love this so much, no matter what Socrates thought. We like to think we stand on the truth, that the ground beneath our feet is stable, moored, which totally works for me. But is it?

When we are stuck in our convictions and personas, we enter into the disease of having good ideas and being right.

We think we have a lock on truth, with our burnished surfaces and articulation, but the bigger we pump ourselves up, the easier we are to prick with a pin. And the bigger we get, the harder it is to see the earth under our feet.

sometimes we’re all really lonely, and hollow, and stripped down to our most naked human selves.

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.

We also like to wear the fleecy cloak we’ve made for ourselves, the finery of being right. Why would you take off the cloak voluntarily? It’s so comfortable and impressive, at least to you.

There is flow everywhere in nature—glaciers are just rivers that are moving really, really slowly—so how could there not be flow in each of us? Or at least in most of us? When we detach or are detached by tragedy or choice from the tendrils of identity, unexpected elements feed us.

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.

As you grew, you collected possessions, the psychic kind you needed to survive: the armor to ward off emotional battery; the snippets of good advice (“Never let them see you cry”) you picked up as you grew. You needed to guard these possessions, and what better safe-deposit box than your body? Plenty of room next to the family secrets and all the scary feelings you swallowed.

It’s everywhere, within and without, around and above, in the most ordinary and trivial, in bread and roses, a glass of water, in dawn and midnight. All you have to do is want to see.

It’s all here, everything we seek and need, inside us.

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.

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.

practice the fifth Get: I get in touch with others.

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.

As we develop love, appreciation, and forgiveness for others over time, we may accidentally develop those things toward ourselves, too.

That we are designed for joy is exhilarating, within reach, now or perhaps later today, after a nap, as long as we do not mistake excitement for joy. Joy is good cheer. My partner says joy and curiosity are the same thing. Joy is always a surprise, and often a decision.

Joy is portable. Joy is a habit, and these days, it can be a radical act.

How did we all get so screwed up? Putting aside our damaged parents, poverty, abuse, addiction, disease, and other unpleasantries, life just damages people. There is no way around this. Not all the glitter and concealer in the world can cover it up. We may have been raised in the illusion that if we played our cards right, life would work out. But it didn’t, it doesn’t.

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.

Life feeds anyone who is open to taste its food, wonder, and glee—its immediacy. We see this toward the end of many people’s lives, when everything in their wasted bodies fights to stay alive, for a few more kisses or bites of ice cream, one more hour with you. Life is still flowing through them: life is them.

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

giddiness leaves you almost no choice but to share, and sharing is what makes us happy.

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. 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.

When my pastor calls the most difficult, annoying people in her life her grace-builders, I want to jump out the window. I am so not there yet, but I understand what she’s talking about.

To surrender is to give up to. You can hold up your hands, palms forward, like someone is pointing a gun at you, or palms up, begging for help, or arms and hands upward, as if lifting something to the sky. In every case, though, you first have to put down your weapons.

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.

Wendell Berry words “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts,” and I want to have had dessert.

So as a radical act we give up the hate and the hunch the best we can. We square our shoulders and lift our gaze.

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.

The stories we have loved, beginning with our earliest days, are how we have survived, grown, and not ended up in gutters barking at ants (knock wood). These stories have saved us, like Jesus and the Buddha and Martin Luther King have saved our lives and souls, and Molly Ivins, Mary Oliver, Gandhi, and E. B. White have saved our sanity, our hearts, and our families. Both versions almost

I want to tell them to savor and delight in everything they write from now until junior high, because after sixth grade they will never think they are any good at anything. It’s never, ever, ever good enough until you learn it’s good enough.

You need to reestablish the purpose of writing. If it’s fame, money, or power, you’re doomed.

So don’t write thinking that publication will fill in the Swiss-cheesy holes in your soul or hoping that it will bring you personal improvement, because it won’t. 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. There is approximately zero chance of that happening.

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.