Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

by Anne Lamott

We have also known the abyss of love lost to death or rejection, and that it somehow leads to new life.

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

Fear, against all odds, leads to community, to bravery and right action, and these give us hope.

T. S. Eliot wrote, “Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still.” We long for this, and yet we check our smartphones every ten minutes for news, texts, distraction.

Don’t be an asshole, and try to remember people’s names, especially those people with no power or cachet, and seek beauty through binoculars, books, records.

A role model isn’t a mentor. Life gave me mentors, though—poetry, pastors, the women’s movement, naturalists, and friends—who helped me come to know several truths of which I am almost sure.

The second thing I know about myself is that I have seen miracles, actual miracles, where people who have been given no chance of living have lived, and in some cases are living still.

But life holds on. Little by little, nature pulls us back, back to growing. This is life. We are life.

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.

We changed. 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 lived, fully, beautifully, with sorrow and joy.

Almost every facet of my meager maturation and spiritual understanding has sprung from hurt, loss, and disaster.

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.

When we are stuck in our convictions and personas, we enter into the disease of having good ideas and being right.

But what comes in is fresh air on our skin, which startles us awake. We’ll never again be as open and vibrational as babies, but maybe now we’ll be a little more present and aware.

Besides, I have known hell, and I have also known love. Love was bigger.

Peace of mind is an inside job, unrelated to fame, fortune, or whether your partner loves you.

We cannot arrange lasting safety or happiness for our most beloved people. They have to find their own ways, their own answers.

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

The message to us kids was that we didn’t have intrinsic value but we could earn it, and that we lived in a world of scarcity but just needed new things. We were simultaneously disappointing and better than people in other families. Evil outweighed good, scarcity outweighed care and abundance.

That day I was teaching my one good message, that we are loved and chosen as is, fearfully and wonderfully made, with love and awe, perfect and fragile.

Besides extreme achievement, basic jungle-survival growing up meant agreeing not to see what was going on in the family but also agreeing to feel responsible for the parents’ unhappiness.

It looked like kids trying to fix unhappy parents by being successful, having good manners, and making handmade cards

By kindergarten, I knew I had more value when I cheered up my parents, did well in school, and finished my chores. In the 1950s, little girls baked and learned to dust furniture, and this pleased everyone—briefly. When I was needy, shy, worried, deeply sensitive, too skinny or, later, overweight—in other words, most me—not so much.

The harm is in the unwanted help or helping them when they need to figure things out for themselves. Help is the sunny side of control.

Jung wrote that when we look outside ourselves, we dream. When we look inside, we wake up. Why would you walk out of a lovely dream, or Plato’s cave, into real life?

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

Besides, those few people who aren’t a mess are probably good for about twenty minutes of dinner conversation.

Joy is portable. Joy is a habit, and these days, it can be a radical act.

We may have been raised in the illusion that if we played our cards right, life would work out. But it didn’t, it doesn’t.

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.

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. Books! To fling myself into a book, to be carried away to another world while being at my most grounded, on my butt or in my bed or favorite chair, is literally how I have survived being here at all.

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.

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.

“Just take it bird by bird, buddy.”

You need to reestablish the purpose of writing. If it’s fame, money, or power, you’re doomed.

Write because you have to, because the process brings great satisfaction. Write because you have a story to tell, not because you think publishing will make you the person you always wanted to be.

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.

Writers save the world—or at any rate, they saved me and everyone I’m close to.

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.

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, so we extracted meaning by selecting certain variables that agreed with our parents’ worldview.

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.

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. This is what actually happens in the great expansiveness of love, which cannot be stopped or constricted. It is only because we exclude it that death becomes more and more foreign to us and, ultimately, our enemy.”

I am mortal, impermanent, imperfect, scared, often uptight and even petty, but wow, what a beautiful sunset.