Almost Everything: Notes on Hope - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anne Lamott is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Hallelujah Anyway; Help, Thanks, Wow; Small Victories; Stitches; Some Assembly Required; Grace (Eventually); Plan B; Traveling Mercies; Bird by Bird; and Operating Instructions. She is also the author of seven novels, including Imperfect Birds and Rosie. A past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an inductee to the California Hall of Fame, she lives in Northern California.

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Puzzles

All truth is paradox. Everything true in the world has innate contradictions. "I know one thing, that I know nothing," Socrates said.

This is distressing to those of us who would prefer a more orderly and predictable system, where you could say and prove that certain things are true, and that their opposites are false. Is this so much to ask? Paradox doesn't always work for me (okay, never), even though I believe both that we are doomed and that life is a magical, mystical gift. I love it here, love my life, though sometimes it has been devastating and sometimes, politically, a fever dream.

Life is taxing enough at its most predictable, but you can't bank on anything. For example, we learned as children that light is particles, and in a predictable world we would all still agree that since light obviously is particles, like grains of sand, we could all get on with our lives and maybe get the cat a flea dip later. But then you have annoying people who say and can prove that light is also waves, like undulations of water.

The paradox is that both of these are true and they're both true at the same time.

But if both aspects of light are true, then why have they never been observed together in the same room at the same time? (The old Batman/Bruce Wayne question.) If it were left to me, one camp would just give in and say, "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.

How is thinking about this at all helpful to my tiny princess self? It upends my best thinking, and my natural response is to mock it. So what if the only constant is change? Why bother touching up your roots? What if Mother Teresa was right that "if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love"? I don't want to hurt more. I have hurt plenty; I'm good on hurt. Ix-nay on more urt-hay.

But almost every facet of my meager maturation and spiritual understanding has sprung from hurt, loss, and disaster. Is it true that the more you give, the richer you are? Do you want my mailing address? Is being born a death sentence-are we, as Beckett said, born astride the grave? If we are born to eternal life, did we already have the good parts that were in process before we existed, where possibly they served dessert with breakfast? These are the questions that keep me up at night.

Paradox means you have to be able to keep two wildly different ideas in your head at the same time. This is one too many for some people, including me on bad days, and sometimes our fearless leaders. I prefer bumper stickers. I really do. "If you lived in your heart, you'd be home now" is all I need as a life philosophy, as I barely avoid smashing into the host bumper it is pasted onto.

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.

The medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart said that if the soul could have known God without the world, God never would have created the world. Paradox is an invitation to know the soul of your own cranky stubborn baby self, and of the sublime. One of the passengers on the famous US Airways Flight 1549 that crash-landed on the Hudson River in 2009 was asked afterward how he felt, and he said, "I was alive before, but now I'm really alive." This is the invitation.

Jesus was a rabbi, schooled by rabbis, who thought like rabbis. Rabbis, upon being asked a question by a disciple, usually answer with a paradoxical inquiry or a story. This can be annoying and time-consuming for those of us looking for neat, simple answers. But truth is too wild and complex to be contained in one answer, so Jesus often responded with a question or a parable.

Most parables are paradoxical in that they don't go the ways you think they will. Jesus is messing with people's minds, paradoxically out of love, so they dig deeper into truth, where they may find themselves, and love, which is the kingdom.

Take any of Jesus' parables. There's the one about a vineyard owner who goes out all day and hires people, each for the standard daily wage, no matter how many hours they work. At quitting time, he gives the last ones hired the daily wage; but then he also gives the people who've worked the longest the same wage. Of course those who've worked the longest kvetch up a storm. I would have. I'd definitely be bitter. Here's the paradox: The owner notes that each of them got what they'd been promised, i.e., enough, the standard daily wage. Why would anybody-like, say, an addict-want more than enough?

No one you know, I'm sure.

Each of us wants so much assurance, and there really isn't much. We religious types think God's love, closeness, and grace are the answers to all of life's pain and general horribleness. But then something bad happens to our children or our health. A young sober woman of my acquaintance who survived a grueling battle with oral cancer, losing part of her tongue in the process, had been in remission for a couple of years and then shared in a gathering that the cancer had returned. She would need more chemo. Everyone began the litany of stunned encouragement, of knowing someone's aunt's beautician who'd had the same prognosis and was still alive, but the young woman waved it all away like smoke.

"Oh, God's got it," she said cheerfully. I wear these words on a necklace. I believe this with all my heart, but at the same time I also believe in science and chemo.

I once saw on YouTube a home movie of a five-year-old girl sobbing beside her baby brother, who is sitting up with the slight rolling motion of an inflatable Bop clown. She alternately sobs to the camera that she doesn't want him to get older, then stops to cuddle him, gazing at him like a suitor and voicing tenderly that she loves him so much, he is the most precious baby in the world, then sobs that she doesn't want to die when she's a hundred, then cuddles him and gushes that she loves his little smiles. I think this pretty much says it. We are consumed by the most intense love for one another and the joy of living, along with the grief and terror that we and our babies will know unbelievable hurt: broken bones, bad boyfriends, old age.

We live one day at a time, knowing it's over too soon, in what feels like about eighteen years, seven months. Zzzzzzzip. Time for a nice catheter and heart pills. Every day we're in the grip of the impossible conundrum: the truth that it's over in a blink, and we may be near the end, and that we have to live as if it's going to be okay, no matter what. Niels Bohr wrote, "The opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth."

We think we know what we know, and we love this so much, no matter what Socrates thought. We like to think we stand on the truth, that the ground beneath our feet is stable, moored, which totally works for me. But is it? In the San Francisco Bay Area? Really?

Yet the blessing of knowing that you don't know is to get gently busted. We may not actually want to know this, but we don't have a choice. It is the same feeling when I hit the wrong button on my phone and all the app icons wiggle and jiggle...