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A review by jmooremyers
Almost Everything: Notes on Hope by Anne Lamott
4.0
Light is drawn to light, like heliotropic flowers, poppies, marigolds, paperwhites. And us. Light, candles, full moons magnify spirit that is in the wings. That is a neat trick, to magnify the invisible, and it raises the question: Is there another room, stage left, one we cannot see? Doesn't something happening in the wings argue a wider net of reality? If there are wings off to the side or behind us, where stuff is unfolding, then reality is more than we can see and measure.
We remember that because truth is paradox, something beautiful is also going on. So while trusting that and waiting for revelation, we do the next right thing. We tell the truth. We march, make dinner, have rummage sales to raise relief funds. ... We remember mustard seeds, that the littlest things will have great results. We do the smallest, realest, most human things. We water that which is dry.
Your good ideas for them would certainly straighten them out and help them make healthier choices. These would help you enjoy life more, too, so whats the harm in your little suggestions, demands, funding? 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.
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.
No one can take this hatred off me. I have to surrender it every time I become aware of it. This will not go well, I know. But I don't want my life's ending to be that I was toxic and self righteous, and I don't know if my last day here will be next Thursday or in twenty years. Whenever that day comes, I want to be living, insofar as possible, in the Wendell Berry words "Be joyful though you have considered all the facts," and I want to have had dessert.
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 in life, moment by moment, which is why you are here.
I tell the kids I teach that a writer is saying: 'Take a walk with me. Let's see where this path leads.' Two of them get up to leave. No, I say, on paper. They moan with disappointment.
I tell the kids: Stories are flashlights. You can shine a light in one place -- an attic floor, a canyon wall, your memory -- and then you describe it the best you can.
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. ... If we tread lightly, hold life lightly, we can look around more bravely. ... It turns out there is not just this -- there is also that, over there.
Perspective doesn't reduce the gravitas; it increases reverence.
Gratitude is seeing how someone changed your heart and quality of life, helped you become the good parts of the person you are.
Your inside person does not have an age. It is all the ages you have every been and the age you are at this very moment.
Hope and peace have to include acceptance of a certain impermanence to everything, of the certain obliteration of all we love, beauty and light and huge marred love. There is the wonder of the ethereal, the quantum and at the same time the umbilical. Don't call it God if that lessens it for you. Call it Ed. Call it Shalom. The Quakers, who are not as awful as most other Christians, call it the light.
Well, this brings us full circle, to just trying to do a little better, today. That is the secret of life.
Horribly, but as always the case, only kindness, forgiveness, and love can save us. Oh, and grace, as spiritual WD-40. ... Love is something alive, personal, and true, the creating and nourishing power within life. It is patient, free to all, and it is medicine and food.
... we are in fact perfect children of Light, and that he loves us more than life itself, and that nothing we do can get God to stop adoring us, be He or She would not object to more of an effort toward active goodness and mercy, even when we feel misunderstood or cranky.
But the willingness to change comes when the pain of staying where you are is too great, like Anais Nin losing her willingness to stay tight in a bud.
My younger brother and I were raised to be perfectionists, which meant that if you somehow, against all odds, managed to finally do something perfectly, you beat yourself up for not having been able to do it years before. We didn't know that mistakes, imperfections, and pain were going to turn into strengths and riches, turn us into Coltrane, Whoopi Goldberg, our true selves. Our parents forgot to mention this.
I have taken the path of liberation: kindness.
The old identities keep us so small, and I unconsciously prefer this. It's safe. ... every so often I notice that I can loosen other identities, too, like tight shoelaces, without having it lead to chaos and death. Contrary to my upbringing, the bigger, the more real, and friendlier the world inside me becomes, the safer I feel in the outside world. As above, so below; as inside, so before us. It is not quite yet a world of infinite possibility, but little by little there are more ice cream flavors I may just try.
Empathy says: You and I are made of the same lovely, heartbroken, and screwed-up stuff. ... Empathy, a moment's compassion, seeing that everyone has equal value, even people who have behaved badly, is as magnetic a force as gratitude. It draws people to us, thus giving us the capacity to practice receiving love, the scariest thing of all, and to experience the curiosity of a child.
Yes, it's hard hard hard, but when I'm having a good time with my big messy family, I notice and savor it, and I say thank you, that this came from a place of joy and absurdity, that it turns out we have it in us to laugh.
Stories teach us what is important about life, why we are here and how it is best to behave, and that inside us we have access to treasure, in memories and observations, in imagination.
Hope springs from that which is right in front of us, which surprises us, and seems to work.
You can't logically get from where we were to where we are now. I think that is what they mean by grace.
God gave the people a rainbow (after the great flood) as the promise, whenever the light of the sun shines through rain. If God gets to start over, then it's a free-for-all, even for cowardly lions like me. (But a rainbow -- I ask you -- how corny is that? And yet every rainbow gets my attention, gets to me, moves me -- every time.)
John Lennon said, 'Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end,' and as this has always been true before, we can hope it will be again.
We remember that because truth is paradox, something beautiful is also going on. So while trusting that and waiting for revelation, we do the next right thing. We tell the truth. We march, make dinner, have rummage sales to raise relief funds. ... We remember mustard seeds, that the littlest things will have great results. We do the smallest, realest, most human things. We water that which is dry.
Your good ideas for them would certainly straighten them out and help them make healthier choices. These would help you enjoy life more, too, so whats the harm in your little suggestions, demands, funding? 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.
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.
No one can take this hatred off me. I have to surrender it every time I become aware of it. This will not go well, I know. But I don't want my life's ending to be that I was toxic and self righteous, and I don't know if my last day here will be next Thursday or in twenty years. Whenever that day comes, I want to be living, insofar as possible, in the Wendell Berry words "Be joyful though you have considered all the facts," and I want to have had dessert.
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 in life, moment by moment, which is why you are here.
I tell the kids I teach that a writer is saying: 'Take a walk with me. Let's see where this path leads.' Two of them get up to leave. No, I say, on paper. They moan with disappointment.
I tell the kids: Stories are flashlights. You can shine a light in one place -- an attic floor, a canyon wall, your memory -- and then you describe it the best you can.
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. ... If we tread lightly, hold life lightly, we can look around more bravely. ... It turns out there is not just this -- there is also that, over there.
Perspective doesn't reduce the gravitas; it increases reverence.
Gratitude is seeing how someone changed your heart and quality of life, helped you become the good parts of the person you are.
Your inside person does not have an age. It is all the ages you have every been and the age you are at this very moment.
Hope and peace have to include acceptance of a certain impermanence to everything, of the certain obliteration of all we love, beauty and light and huge marred love. There is the wonder of the ethereal, the quantum and at the same time the umbilical. Don't call it God if that lessens it for you. Call it Ed. Call it Shalom. The Quakers, who are not as awful as most other Christians, call it the light.
Well, this brings us full circle, to just trying to do a little better, today. That is the secret of life.
Horribly, but as always the case, only kindness, forgiveness, and love can save us. Oh, and grace, as spiritual WD-40. ... Love is something alive, personal, and true, the creating and nourishing power within life. It is patient, free to all, and it is medicine and food.
... we are in fact perfect children of Light, and that he loves us more than life itself, and that nothing we do can get God to stop adoring us, be He or She would not object to more of an effort toward active goodness and mercy, even when we feel misunderstood or cranky.
But the willingness to change comes when the pain of staying where you are is too great, like Anais Nin losing her willingness to stay tight in a bud.
My younger brother and I were raised to be perfectionists, which meant that if you somehow, against all odds, managed to finally do something perfectly, you beat yourself up for not having been able to do it years before. We didn't know that mistakes, imperfections, and pain were going to turn into strengths and riches, turn us into Coltrane, Whoopi Goldberg, our true selves. Our parents forgot to mention this.
I have taken the path of liberation: kindness.
The old identities keep us so small, and I unconsciously prefer this. It's safe. ... every so often I notice that I can loosen other identities, too, like tight shoelaces, without having it lead to chaos and death. Contrary to my upbringing, the bigger, the more real, and friendlier the world inside me becomes, the safer I feel in the outside world. As above, so below; as inside, so before us. It is not quite yet a world of infinite possibility, but little by little there are more ice cream flavors I may just try.
Empathy says: You and I are made of the same lovely, heartbroken, and screwed-up stuff. ... Empathy, a moment's compassion, seeing that everyone has equal value, even people who have behaved badly, is as magnetic a force as gratitude. It draws people to us, thus giving us the capacity to practice receiving love, the scariest thing of all, and to experience the curiosity of a child.
Yes, it's hard hard hard, but when I'm having a good time with my big messy family, I notice and savor it, and I say thank you, that this came from a place of joy and absurdity, that it turns out we have it in us to laugh.
Stories teach us what is important about life, why we are here and how it is best to behave, and that inside us we have access to treasure, in memories and observations, in imagination.
Hope springs from that which is right in front of us, which surprises us, and seems to work.
You can't logically get from where we were to where we are now. I think that is what they mean by grace.
God gave the people a rainbow (after the great flood) as the promise, whenever the light of the sun shines through rain. If God gets to start over, then it's a free-for-all, even for cowardly lions like me. (But a rainbow -- I ask you -- how corny is that? And yet every rainbow gets my attention, gets to me, moves me -- every time.)
John Lennon said, 'Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end,' and as this has always been true before, we can hope it will be again.