Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

by Anne Lamott

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.

Writing that carries truth uplifts us, teaches empathy, purpose, dignity. This means taking out the lies and boring parts, and especially the grandstanding sections, which are probably the parts you love most.

The story has to have really happened, even if the writer has made it up. The reader has to trust the truth in a story. We’re doing this all the time inside us, reporting to ourselves on what we see, trying to make sense of this life. The stories we tell ourselves and write can warp us or raise us, save or destroy us, illuminate or dissemble.

The details we choose are what make a story resonate, and when a story resonates, the dust of confusion clears for a few minutes, and things hold together—and how often does this happen in the rest of life?

The universe is usually telling us the same story, that our lives are rich and fluid and infinitely mysterious; that we only thought we were stuck, that nothing stays the same for long.

We have to cultivate the habits of curiosity and paying attention, which are essential to living rich lives and writing.

The characters in your story are real people to you, and include you, but they aren’t yet real people to your audience: they weren’t there. The specific details are what make it universal, what make it sing. Life is made up of these mosaic moments, seemingly meaningless details that tug on your sleeve to get your attention.

Life is made up of these mosaic moments, seemingly meaningless details that tug on your sleeve to get your attention.

Let the energy of your story be the drama—what you’ve experienced that was so amazing or touching—instead of draping it with Christmas tree lights or sparklers. If we readers sense that you’re manipulating us—making the story hot, because you don’t have confidence in it—the story loses its beauty, and we turn on you.

A story does not need to be hot. Stories are usually about a modest salvation. Events took us on a journey that was inconvenient or scary, and changed us, in ways that helped us feel more connected to life, made it more spacious and welcoming.

story does not need to be hot. Stories are usually about a mode...

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

I tell the six-year-olds that if they want to have great lives, they need to read a lot or listen to the written word. If they rely only on their own thinking, they will not notice the power that is all around them, the force-be-with-you kind of power. Reading and writing help us take the blinders off so we can look around and say “Wow,” so we can look at life and our lives with care, and curiosity, and attention to detail, which are what will make us happy and less afraid.

Writing breaks the trance of our belief that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and we need to protect ourselves and our families at all times.

The right story can show us how to lighten up. If we tread lightly, hold life lightly, we can look around more bravely.

Without blinders on, we are not forced to get life to conform to our convictions, our past pain, or our superior belief system. It turns out there is not...

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,

I love Ram Dass’s line that when all is said and done, we are all just walking each other home.

At some point you experience that a body is just the shell of a person, a cocoon that’s been outgrown.

Dearest, if you could just gently tend to the body of a dead person, wash them with a warm soapy cloth, rub oil into their skin, dress them in their favorite clothes—don’t forget socks!—and see the love and honor in this, it would greatly diminish your fears.

Maybe you search for understanding, but find only one thing for sure, which is that truth comes in small moments and visions, not galaxies and canyons; not the crash of ocean waves and cymbals. Most traditions teach that truth is in these small holy moments.

It’s poignant to see kin and friends who were once so vital grow aged. There is grief at the memorial service, but also gratitude for what the person brought to our lives, amazement at the details in the obituary—who knew about all the places she traveled to, all the volunteering she did?

Gratitude is seeing how someone changed your heart and quality of life, helped you become the good parts of the person you are. Never will a gathering of people feel a deeper awareness of the present, a longing for immersion in the right now, and to share their love out loud with those they love most, than at a memorial service. This often lasts the whole day.

Of course when certain people die, there is anguish. We will never get over their deaths, and we’re not supposed to.

Most of my spiritual breakthroughs have been against my will. I am mortal, impermanent, imperfect, scared, often uptight and even petty, but wow, what a beautiful sunset.

Life is richer when it is simple. A walk, buttered toast, a child’s soccer game. You’re afforded the opportunity to stop doing and can instead just be here. Wow.

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When I am sitting next to people who are in the process of transition, I always tell them: Stay as long as you want, and fly away whenever you’re ready.

Silence is medicine.

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.

a higher power is not easily defined. It can’t be controlled, manipulated, or appropriated. It opens us and heals us and brings us together and turns hearts of stone into human hearts.

There were moments when I understood that there was nothing much I was going to understand or figure out. There was simply the present moment, awareness, impermanence, birdsong, love. There is no fixing this setup here. It seems broken and ruined at times, but it isn’t: it’s simply the nature of human life.

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.

The Dalai Lama said that “religion is like going out to dinner with friends. Everyone may order something different, but everyone can still sit at the same table.”

Play is learning how to wait, how to applaud someone else’s success, how to let others go first. It’s reciprocity and laughter. It’s very simple and it brings us deeply into the Now,

God is often in solitude and quiet, through the still, small voice—in the breeze, not the thunder.

Maybe more than ever before in my lifetime, my friends and I are aware of our brokenness and the deep crazy, the desperation for light, hope, food, and medicine for the poor.

We believe grace is stronger than evil and sin. We believe love is stronger than hate, that the divine is bigger than all huge egos simmered together in a bloviation stew, and this makes us laugh. And laughter is hope. We believe and hope that we will get through these terrifying times.

You can’t force people to be willing to face their pain and anger, to own the ugliness that is in all of us.

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,

mostly what we don’t want to feel is fear.

My therapist said starving and dieting are like putting ice cream on a leg wound. I said that ice cream would feel cool and numbing. She said yes and then it would melt.

Eventually one has to find a way to eat and be kind to one’s body.

this is the body you’re going to have the entire time you are here.

Love means care of, respect for, and delight in our own selves and bodies. The delight part may seem a bit of a stretch, but there’s no way around it.

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.

we crave what we eat,

If you are not okay with yourself at 185 pounds, you may not be okay at 150, or even 135. The self-respect and peace of mind you long for is not in your weight. It’s within you. I resent that more than I can say. But it’s true. 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.

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