Your job is to present clearly your viewpoint, your line of vision. Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense.
All you can give us is what life is about from your point of view. You are not going to be able to give us the plans to the submarine. Life is not a submarine. There are no plans.
My true religion is kindness.” That is a great moral position – practicing kindness, keeping one’s heart open in the presence of suffering.
This is a hard planet, and we’re a vulnerable species. And all I can do is pray: Help. When.
When what we see catches us off guard, and when we write it as realistically and openly as possible, it offers hope.
Sometimes I could not tell you exactly why, especially when it feels pointless and pitiful, like Sisyphus with cash-flow problems. Other.
Those plates would be filled with love, pride, and connection. That care is what we have longed for our whole lives, and what we create when we are kinder to our bodies and our hungry souls.
Empathy says: You and I are made of the same lovely, heartbroken, and screwed-up stuff.
Sigh: who was it who said that to get into heaven, you needed a letter of recommendation from the poor?
I would give her the same advice God always gives me if I think to ask: Go do some anonymous things for lonely people, give a few bucks to every poor person you see, return phone calls. Get out of yourself and become a person for others, while simultaneously practicing radical self-care: maybe have a bite to eat, check in with the sky twice, buy some cute socks, take a nap.
My brothers and I were not encouraged to search for God, the obvious source of solace, but we three kids were led to the world of books, which to us was just as good. We found in books the divine plop, the joy of settling down deeply into something, worlds and realities greater than our own troubled minds.
Every time we choose the good action or response, the decent, the valuable, it builds, incrementally, to renewal, resurrection, the place of newness, freedom, justice.
When we try to see a damaged person as one of God’s regular old customers, instead of a lost cause, it takes the pressure off everybody. We can then loosen our death grip on the person, which usually results in progress for everyone, also known in certain circles as grace.
I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be.
I realized during that session that I wanted Sam to grow up with the sense that it’s safe to fall, that there’s enough of the important stuff in the world for him, including Band-Aids.
Dealing with your rage and grief will give you life. That is both the good news and the bad news: The solution is at hand. Wherever the great dilemma exists is where the great growth is, too.” – Anne Lamott.
We contain all the ages we have ever been.
What those people think of me is none of my business.
It all made me think of Eugene O’Neill’s line, “Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.
The world has an awful beauty. This is a chaotic place, humanity is a chaotic place, and I am a chaotic place.