Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

by Anne Lamott

Usually this holiness takes a backseat to our toxic self-obsessed nattering monkey minds.

That is the paradox, that aliveness is chemical, electrical, and sacred. Aliveness is what we find way deep down inside, for a moment here, an interval there, those pulses that go on inside us all the time, in our homes, in our environment, and in the universe, the continuum from which we are so often isolated in our self-conscious kiosks, by habit and upbringing. The moment is truth, and so is the continuum.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

And I promise that the people you lose here on this side of eternity, whom you can no longer call or text, will live fully again both in your heart and in the world. They will make you smile and talk out loud at

the most inappropriate times. Of course, their absence will cause lifelong pangs of homesickness, but grief, friends, time, and tears will heal you to some extent. Tears will bathe, baptize, and hydrate you and the seeds beneath the surface of the ground on which you walk. Somehow, as we get older, death becomes as sacred as birth, and while we don’t exactly welcome it, death becomes a friend.

My parents had apparently not read the letter where Rilke wrote: “I am not saying that we should love death, but rather that we should love life so generously, without picking and choosing, that we automatically include it (life’s other half) in our love.