Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

by Anne Lamott

If it’s creative release, or you have a story to tell, or if you’ve just always wanted to write a novel, or you just love to write, the way other people like to garden, you’re good.

They got to be writers when they grew up, their lifelong dream. Their stories, their memories, imaginations, and images are like treasures in their hearts, springing forth from the ground of being, the common well, things that they alone can tell, in their own voices and language, even if inadequately, with a sense of accomplishment, struggle, concentration, fulfillment, and for a few minutes every few days, pride.

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

For example, at a memorial service, there is deep grief in the room, but also gratitude, love, emptiness, and many kinds of food. At a holiday party, people are decked out in their finery, beaming with cheer, but maybe not doing so fine on the inside. We are this, and not this; that, and not that.

I will tell my fifth-graders that the main reason to be a writer is that it is the perfect antidote to materialism, which drains our soul and spirit. Writing dilutes our habitual fear and our need for control. When they are older, the kids get to decide how to spend their lives: in tightly controlled, hyperachieving ways, putting away childish things, if they so choose. Or they can write.

The first thing I told her is that I have been on hand to help people cross over, been there for days and months at the end of a person’s life, and while I would prefer that all deaths be swift and sweet, without dementia or pain, every death has been rather beautiful.

Second, the more time you spend in the presence of death, the less you fear it. Your life will be greatly enhanced by spending time with dying people, even though you’ve been taught to avoid doing so. Third, death is not the enemy; snakes are. And cheese: it is addictive and irresistible. I have had three kinds so far today.

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.

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

The love and energy remained, those fields of atoms that aren’t wafted away at death from our familiar sphere.

I have felt this so often, how we flash on our loved ones who’ve died, which means they are alive in us.

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. Even our friend Jesus, whom we don’t see acting ebullient very often, expresses pleasure in Matthew 11: “Thank you, Father, because you reveal things to the small and simple and hide them from the clever.” (I think he was looking at his disciples then, and fully acknowledged what a sorry bunch they were, and we are, and yet in their way they were getting it. They were seeing the glory around for those who have eyes to see, the kingdom within.) “Watch,” Jesus says, again and again.

Watch. See the divine presence everywhere, from the most glorious bearded Tibetan iris, to weeds and grasses, to cacti.

It’s poignant to see kin and friends who were once so vital grow aged.

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.

The reason to draw close to death when we’re younger is to practice finding and living in the soul.

Can you even imagine living this way, charmed by the world, in the light of gratitude, for what is real, for the truth of who we always have been and will continue to be, no matter how much ground we lose? I don’t think my parents remembered to teach me this. This truly is what it means to be born again.

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.

When we talk about goodness, an animating intelligence in the universe and in our hearts or a pervasive positive unity or presence, we are not talking about an old bearded guy in the sky, Parvati, or a Jewish Palestinian baby. We are talking about a higher power, a power that might be called Not Me, a kindness, a patience, a hope, which is everywhere, even in our annoying, self-centered, fraudulent selves.

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. Anytime you are experiencing love, you are experiencing the God we are talking about. But as novelist David James Duncan says, “God” is the “worst nickname ever.”

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.

our little Tea Party friends, it would be this: Fundamentalism, in all its forms, is ninety percent of the reason the world is so terrifying.

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.

I would never, ever pound any particular text. 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.”

We have to make ourselves available to one another, or we can’t experience goodness. It’s not so much us seeking God, tracking Her down with a butterfly net; it’s agreeing to be found. The Old Girl reaches out to everyone and wants to include us in this beautiful, weird, sometimes anguished life. All people: go figure. These days are among the hardest we will

ever live through. The wind is blowing, but because we are together in this, we have hope. Most days. 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. What helps is that we are not all crazy and hopeless on the same day. One of us remembers and reminds the rest of us that when it is really dark you can see the stars. 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.

loving community will outlast our present darkness

and cruelty. Mr. Einstein said that the fourth world war will be fought with sticks and stones. My belief is that even then there will be mercy, goodness, and loving-kindness.

to just trying to do a little better, today. That is the secret of life.

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.

I have taken the path of liberation: kindness.

He died, but he is still in my present tense.”

Why?” is rarely a useful question in the hope business.

John Lennon said, “Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end,”

We have all we need to come through. Against all odds, no matter what we’ve lost, no matter what messes we’ve made over time, no matter how dark the night, we offer and are offered kindness, soul, light, and food, which create breath and spaciousness, which create hope, sufficient unto the day.