Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

by Anne Lamott

Love has been a wild animal, a poultice, a dinghy, a coat. Love is why we have hope. So why have some of us felt like jumping off tall buildings ever since we can remember, even those of us who do not struggle with clinical depression? Why have we repeatedly imagined turning the wheels of our cars into oncoming trucks? We just do.

Love and goodness and the world’s beauty and humanity are the reasons we have hope.

I wake up not knowing if our leader has bombed North Korea. And still, this past year has been just about the happiest of my life. So yeah: it can all be a bit confusing.

then #45

On the one hand, there is the hopelessness of people living in grinding poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, and uptown Oakland. On the other, we pour our money and time into organizations that feed and mentor people, teach in Uganda and Appalachia, show up in refugee camps with water and art supplies. People like us all over the world teach girls auto repair and electrical installation, teach boys to care for babies. Witnessing this fills me to bursting with hope. I have never witnessed both more global and national brutality and such goodness in the world’s response to her own.

And we’re rarely all alone. People come and go in our lives, surround us with their best selves, take us to the beach, to a bookstore, out for ice cream. So little bits of life and grace, time, habits, duties, a phone call, more time, all filter in to the seed under the concrete. And that seed pushes up through, no matter what, because this is how life is constructed—to live.

that love is the only truth, and that truth heals.

we were spiritual beings having human experiences, not vice versa, and that spirit, love, and truth were actual reality, superseding the vagaries of our physical realities. Everyone else teased us, calling us the woo-woo twins.

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 very much felt the love and support of her two sons nearby, not as ghosts or angels, but as living presences inside her.

How i feel about Daddy and Papa...they ARE living presences inside of me

“Okay, light is particles,” or “Fine, have it your way, light is waves.” Maybe life and light are both like that, two mints in one.

But all truth really is paradox, and this turns out to be a reason for hope. If you arrive at a place in life that is miserable, it will change, and something else about it will also be true. So paradox is an invitation to go deeper into life, to see a bigger screen, instead of the nice, safe lower left quadrant where you see work, home, and the country. Try a wider reality, through curiosity, awareness, and breath. Try actually being here. What a concept.

Meister Eckhart said that if the soul could have known God without the world, God never would have created the world.

But truth is too wild and complex to be contained in one answer,

Santa Rosa, California, in 2017

We saw devastation, of course, but we also witnessed holiness in the burned world and what was left standing—a fireplace, a heavily laden persimmon tree, pallets of bottled

water from out of state, the sky. We saw humanity.

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.

Protein and greens are obvious food, but so is buoyancy, when we don’t feel as mired in the silt of despair.

Not one single person in history has gotten an alcoholic sober. (Maybe you’ll be the first. But—and I say this with love—I doubt it.) If it is someone else’s problem, you probably don’t have the solution.

Maybe retracing our steps to the origin of the problem is helpful. Most emotional wounds are caused by a child’s belief or feedback that he is deficient, defective, or annoying—probably all three. Perhaps the father had tiny warmth issues, and the mother was a bit tense, or vice versa. To make the parents proud, the child needed to do better, add certain qualities, gain or lose some weight, remove any offending traits or tics, and not make other people get inferiority complexes.

my mother, my father, my brother... orginating with my birth mother and father

this pleased everyone—briefly.

later, overweight—in other words, most me—not so much.

I absolutely don’t buy into the current mania for tidiness and decluttering.

This is a great awakening, but with it comes horrible news: Everyone else has value, too. Even the horrible relatives you can’t stand. And the ones in your family who are over the age of eighteen are exactly where they are supposed to be, or at least get to be. They has value, as they are, whether heroic or appalling.

You can raise and care for your nearest and dearest the best you can, put them in the best schools, rehab, condo, or memory care, and never, ever give up on their having the best possible life available. But if you do so thinking you can rescue them with your good ideas and your checkbook, or get them to

choose a healthy, realistic way of life, that mistake will make both of you much worse than you already are.

Grace helped me throw in the towel. Or rather it helped pry it out of my cold, dead hands. I got help—for me. I stopped routinely giving my son money and a place to sleep. I accepted that he might end up dead and that I absolutely could not save him. It was the very, very worst time of my life.

Almost everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, scared, and yet designed for joy.

In Louise Penny's books, FINE stands for "Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Egotistical".

As we develop love, appreciation, and forgiveness for others over time, we may accidentally develop those things toward ourselves, too. While you might think it’s a trick, having affection for one’s goofy, crabby, annoying, lovely self is home. This has been my meager salvation.

Joy is good cheer. My partner says joy and curiosity are the same thing. Joy is always a surprise, and often a decision.

So for now let’s define joy as a slightly giddy appreciation, an inquisitive stirring, as when you see the first crocuses, the earliest struggling, stunted emergence of color in late winter, cream or gold against the tans and browns.

(In recovery, we call fine “Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional.”)

To pay close attention to and mostly accept your life, inside and out and around your body, is to be halfway home.

she and some of the old-timers secretly pray upon waking, “Whatever,” and pray before falling asleep, “Oh, well.”

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.

Adults rarely have the imagination or energy of children, but we do have one another, and nature, and old black-and-white movies, and the ultimate secret weapon, books.

get taken out of myself, and I get to salute all the people and experiences I recognize, with surprise and pleasure. “I so get that, but I never found the words. I know her. I am her.” This reactivates the giddiness muscle, and giddiness leaves you almost no choice but to share, and sharing is what makes us happy.

Booker T. Washington said, “I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him,”

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.

If we work hard and are lucky, we may come to see everyone as precious, struggling souls.

He must have been nearly destroyed, and thus he destroys. (Remind you of anyone?)

This country has felt more stunned and doomed than at any time since the assassinations of the 1960s and the Vietnam War, and while a sense of foreboding may be appropriate, the hate is not. At some point, the hate becomes an elective.

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

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.

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.

movie screen in their minds called the imagination, which they can see if they close their eyes.

It’s never, ever, ever good enough until you learn it’s good enough.