Look back on your life and find something small that made a big difference.
One rarely knows where to begin the search for meaning, though by necessity, we can only start where we are.
Usually if you pray from the heart, you get an answer – the phone rings or the mail comes, and light gets in through the cracks, so you can see the next right thing to do. That’s all you need.
By the end I was deteriorating faster than I could lower my standards.
If you screwed up and said out loud that you thought something scary was happening, grown-ups would say, “Oh, for Pete’s sake – what an imagination.” This is the best way to gaslight children. It keeps them under control, because if the parent is a mess, the children are doomed. It’s best for the child to think he or she is the problem. Then there is toxic hope, which is better than no hope at all, that if the child can do better or need less, the parents will be fine.
How alive am I willing to be?
Anything that leaves you more fearful, more isolated, more disconnected from other people, more full of judgment or self-hatred, is not of God, does not follow the Rule of Love – and you should stop doing it.
I try to write the books I would love to come upon, that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness – and that can make me laugh. When I am reading a book like this, I feel rich and profoundly relieved to be in the presence of someone who will share the truth with me, and throw the lights on a little, and I try to write these kinds of books. Books, for me, are medicine.
We can pray for a shot at having a life in which we are present and awake and paying attention and being kind to ourselves. We can pray, “Hello? Is there anyone there?” We can pray, “Am I too far gone, or can you help me get out of my isolated self-obsession?” We can say anything to God. It’s all prayer.
Additionally, I have spent approximately 1,736 hours of this one precious life waiting for the man to finish and pretending that felt good. And I want a refund.
They taught us that extending ourselves to others would help us stay sober and sane. But they also wanted us to extend ourselves to our own horrible selves, get ourselves a lovely cup of tea. It was and is the hardest work ever.
You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander.
We, too, are shadow and light. We are not supposed to know this, or be all these different facets of humanity, bright and dark. We are raised to be bright and shiny, but there is meaning in the acceptance of our dusky and dappled side, and also in defiance.
Being human can be so dispiriting. It is a real stretch for me a lot of the time.
When you love something like reading – or drawing or music or nature – it surrounds you with a sense of connection to something great. If you are lucky enough to know this, then your search for meaning involves whatever that Something is. It’s an alchemical blend of affinity and focus that takes us to a place within that feels as close as we ever get to “home.” It’s like pulling into our own train station after a long trip – joy, relief, a pleasant exhaustion.
What helps is that we are not all crazy and hopeless on the same day.
Most of us don’t notice how great we look until years, even decades later. Not long ago, I was looking at photos of myself at various ages and weights – way before the neckular deterioration began, way before the fanny pack of menopause – and I could see how gorgeous I must have looked to everyone else.
Alone, we are doomed, but by the same token, we’ve learned that people are impossible, even the ones we love most – especially the ones we love most: they’re damaged, prickly and set in their ways.
If you want to feel loving, I coached myself, do something loving. This is basic soul care.
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored.