Notes On Hope
Yes, even you can write a life manual.
In turbulent times, I often turn to Anne Lamott’s books.
Her wise words, her humor and her ability to share every detail of her flaws, in an effort to show how misery loves company (it works!), just makes me feel whole again.
After this weekend’s news and the general malaise of an endless winter and an unknowing feeling, I opened Anne’s Almost Everything, Notes on Hope (2018). On the very first page, she summed it up perfectly:
“The news of late has captured the fever dream of modern life: everything exploding, burning, being shot, or crashing to the ground all around us, while growing older has provided me with a measure of perspective and equilibrium, and a lovely, long term romance.”
While Lamott is older than me, I feel the measure of finding my own equanimity in her words while the world seems to be crumbling outside. Her juxtaposition between the extreme opposites also feels so at home to me.
I have a habit of wanting to share doom and gloom stories with friends and families, all while offering tea and homemade cookies in the same breath. It’s something I have always done, not to be a buzz-kill, but rather as a ‘can you believe it?’ reflex. (My kids have reminded me to check my doom and gloom news sharing as soon as I feel the urge. It’s a work in progress.)
While Lamott leans into her own fury about the world going to hell in a hand-basket, she also is fully able to lean into the joy and miracle of love. Like her, I do that often as well. Also like her, I don’t take for granted, one minute, my 33 year marriage that is the foundational soil for everything that blooms in my life. It nurtures me everyday. And like Anne, it’s especially not lost on me as I get older.
She goes on in that first page, adding:
“Towns and cities, ice fields, democracy, people - all disappear, while we rejoice in the spring and the sweetness of old friendships. Families are tricky. There is so much going on that flattens us, that is huge, scary, or simply appalling. We’re doomed, stunned, exhausted and overcaffeinated.”
How could she know that this is our life in the spring of 2026, when she wrote this ten years earlier? Seriously.
She knows because this is life. Not just for us, but for the generation before us, the one before that, and forever and ever.
Amen.
This is what it means to be alive.
This is the life that we didn’t sign up for, but for which we are so lucky to have been picked. And whether you see yourself as the awkward 5th grader standing in the back of the gym as dodgeball teams get chosen, or as the natural jock taking your place as the team’s captain, at the end of the day, we all get the same prize, (if we are lucky enough to wake up everyday) – to make the best of this messy, glorious, difficult, upside down, amazing life.
And our mission, should we accept it, is to live out these days as best we can.
Lamott’s perennial words, in this book and others, serve as a bit of a compass for me. They are a map, a guide, a recipe when I feel like I need a bit more usual guidance than my typical, ‘let’s just see what happens’ approach to things. I am a solopreneur with my own business, a storyteller in my family, a creative chef in the kitchen, a natural gardener, a self-taught painter.
But when the world feels fraught, I turn to the handful of sages that guide and calm me. They come in the form of writers like Lamott, Irish poets like John O’Donohue and David Whyte, storytellers like Ira Glass, composers like Bach and Lauridsen, or artists like Winslow Homer.
These are my imaginary friends that ground me, inspire me, challenge me, and lift me up. A few pages in on any of these folks, and I am almost complete again. Add in my favorite Bach piano concerto, get me a couple of hours in my studio with a palette knife, or let me know that 4 are suddenly coming for dinner (like tonight), and I am the star of a game show called, ‘making something out of nothing.” Suddenly, my adrenaline and endorphins are flying.
I am whole again.
Knowing what you get from your life companion or oldest friends, being able to lean into your imaginary guides and life philosophers, or knowing the habits and rituals that can bring you back to yourself, to me, is part of this life’s meaning class. It’s like finally knowing the material well enough that I can teach it, I can settle myself, I can suggest ways to help friends in need.
Lamott, an esteemed author, speaker and spiritual guide to many, has earned her place to write a short book called Almost Everything. The Almost Everything to which she refers, is her own life manual of almost everything she knows. And at 70, a mother, grandmother, new wife, recovering alcoholic, bulimic, and recoverer of other maladies, a skeptic, cynic, Sunday school teacher, critic, volunteer, vocal liberal democrat and animal lover, lays out her life manual, not as a guide for us to follow, but as a prompt for us to think about our own.
She’s like some imaginary angel whispering in your ear that you are not half as awful, full of shame, embarrassed, lazy, scared, fearful or tired as you think you are. Instead, you are are a gorgeous creature with gifts to share at a pace you never know. What a gift indeed.
For those reasons, and so many more, every
time I read her books, I start to imagine my own guide to this life, based on almost everything I know. What a gift. What a prompt!
What are we waiting for?
After thirty years helping organizations discover their deepest why through TRU2U Communications, I’ve learned that purpose without community is just an idea on paper. My work has been about building bridges between business as platforms for social change, and the power consumers have for making a difference. When we connect people through meaningful stories of resilience and hope, we’re not just reimagining how powerful our actions can be - we’re remembering who we are: humans who thrive when we lift each other up.
Beautiful MJ..."This is what it means to be alive." What it means to be present and in our True Essence.