Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

by Anne Lamott

If you arrive at a place in life that is miserable, it will change, and something else about it will also be true.

Scientists say we are made of stars, and I believe them, although my upper arms look like hell. Maybe someday the stars will reabsorb me. Maybe, as fundamentalist Christians have shared with me, I will rot in hell for all eternity, which I would hate, because I am very sensitive.

If it is someone else’s problem, you probably don’t have the solution.

Most emotional wounds are caused by a child’s belief or feedback that he is deficient, defective, or annoying—probably all three.

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.

The nature of our basic family dysfunction is that we want to present to the world as a kindly, engaged, smart clan that’s doing just fine. (In recovery, we call fine “Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional.”)

An old woman in twelve-step recovery once told me that while there is an elaborate prayer in one of the steps, of turning one’s life and all results over to the care of God, as each person understands God, she and some of the old-timers secretly pray upon waking, “Whatever,” and pray before falling asleep, “Oh, well.” 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.

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

Wendell Berry words “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts,”

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

You never get over certain losses, but the anguish part eventually ends, and it all just sucks for a while.

the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.

The love of our dogs and cats is the closest most of us will come to knowing the direct love of God on this side of eternity.