12 TRUTHS I LEARNED FROM LIFE
by Ann Lemott
My
seven-year-old grandson sleeps just down the hall from me, and he wakes
up a lot of mornings and he says, "You know, this could be the best day
ever." And other times, in the middle of the night, he calls out in a
tremulous voice, "Nana, will you ever get sick and die?"
I think this pretty much says it for me and for most of the people I
know, that we're a mixed grill of happy anticipation and dread. So I sat
down a few days before my 61st birthday,and I decided to compile a list
of everything I know for sure. There's so little truth in the popular
culture, and it's good to be sure of a few things.
For instance, I am no longer 47, although this is the age I feel, and
the age I like to think of myself as being. My friend Paul used to say
in his late 70s that he felt like a young man with something really
wrong with him.
Our true person is outside of time and space, but looking at the
paperwork, I can, in fact, see that I was born in 1954. My inside self
is outside of time and space. It doesn't have an age. I'm every age I've
ever been, and so are you, although I can't help mentioning as an
aside that it might have been helpful if I hadn't followed the skin care
rules of the '60s, which involved getting as much sun as possible while
slathered in baby oil and basking in the glow of a tinfoil reflector
shield.
It was so liberating, though, to face the truth that I was no longer
in the last throes of middle age, that I decided to write down every
single true thing I know. People feel really doomed and overwhelmed
these days, and they keep asking me what's true. So I hope that my list
of things I'm almost positive about might offer some basic operating
instructions to anyone who is feeling really overwhelmed or beleaguered.
Number one: the first and truest thing is that all truth is a
paradox. Life is both a precious, unfathomably beautiful gift, and it's
impossible here, on the incarnational side of things. It's been a very
bad match for those of us who were born extremely sensitive.It's so hard
and weird that we sometimes wonder if we're being punked. It's filled
simultaneously with heartbreaking sweetness and beauty, desperate
poverty, floods and babies and acne and Mozart, all swirled together. I
don't think it's an ideal system.
Number two: almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes -- including you.
Three: there is almost nothing outside of you that will help in any
kind of lasting way,unless you're waiting for an organ. You can't buy,
achieve or date serenity and peace of mind. This is the most horrible
truth, and I so resent it. But it's an inside job, and we can't arrange
peace or lasting improvement for the people we love most in the
world.They have to find their own ways, their own answers. You can't run
alongside your grown children with sunscreen and ChapStick on their
hero's journey. You have to release them.It's disrespectful not to. And
if it's someone else's problem, you probably don't have the answer,
anyway.
Our help is usually not very helpful. Our help is often toxic. And
help is the sunny side of control. Stop helping so much. Don't get your
help and goodness all over everybody.
This brings us to number four: everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy
and scared, even the people who seem to have it most together. They are
much more like you than you would believe, so try not to compare your
insides to other people's outsides. It will only make you worse than you
already are.
Also, you can't save, fix or rescue any of them or get anyone
sober. What helped me get clean and sober 30 years ago was the
catastrophe of my behavior and thinking. So I asked some sober friends
for help, and I turned to a higher power. One acronym for God is the
"gift of desperation," G-O-D, or as a sober friend put it, by the end I
was deteriorating faster than I could lower my standards.
So God might mean, in this case, "me running out of any more good ideas."
While fixing and saving and trying to rescue is futile, radical
self-care is quantum, and it radiates out from you into the
atmosphere like a little fresh air. It's a huge gift to the world. When
people respond by saying, "Well, isn't she full of herself," just smile
obliquely like Mona Lisa and make both of you a nice cup of tea. Being
full of affection for one's goofy, self-centered, cranky, annoying
self is home. It's where world peace begins.
Number five: chocolate with 75 percent cacao is not actually a food.
Its best use is as a bait in snake traps or to balance the legs of wobbly chairs. It was never meant to be considered an edible.
Number six --
writing. Every writer you know writes really terrible first
drafts, but they keep their butt in the chair. That's the secret of
life. That's probably the main difference between you and them. They
just do it. They do it by prearrangement with themselves. They do it as a
debt of honor. They tell stories that come through them one day at a
time, little by little.When my older brother was in fourth grade, he had
a term paper on birds due the next day, and he hadn't started. So my
dad sat down with him with an Audubon book, paper, pencils and brads
-- for those of you who have gotten a little less young and remember
brads -- and he said to my brother, "Just take it bird by bird,
buddy. Just read about pelicans and then write about pelicans in your
own voice. And then find out about chickadees, and tell us about them in
your own voice. And then geese."
So the two most important things about writing are: bird by bird and
really god-awful first drafts. If you don't know where to
start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is
yours, and you get to tell it. If people wanted you to write more warmly
about them, they should've behaved better.
You're going to feel like hell if you wake up someday and you never
wrote the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart: your
stories, memories, visions and songs -- your truth, your version of
things -- in your own voice. That's really all you have to offer us,and
that's also why you were born.
Seven: publication and temporary creative successes are something you
have to recover from. They kill as many people as not. They will hurt,
damage and change you in ways you cannot imagine. The most degraded and
evil people I've ever known are male writers who've had huge best
sellers. And yet, returning to number one, that all truth is
paradox, it's also a miracle to get your work published, to get your
stories read and heard. Just try to bust yourself gently of the
fantasy that publication will heal you, that it will fill the
Swiss-cheesy holes inside of you. It can't. It won't. But writing
can. So can singing in a choir or a bluegrass band. So can painting
community murals or birding or fostering old dogs that no one else will.
Number eight: families. Families are hard, hard, hard, no matter how
cherished and astonishing they may also be. Again, see number one.
At family gatherings where you suddenly feel homicidal or suicidal
--remember that in all cases, it's a miracle that any of us,
specifically, were conceived and born. Earth is forgiveness school. It
begins with forgiving yourself, and then you might as well start at the
dinner table. That way, you can do this work in comfortable pants.
When William Blake said that we are here to learn to endure the beams
of love, he knew that your family would be an intimate part of
this, even as you want to run screaming for your cute little life. But I
promise you are up to it. You can do it, Cinderella, you can do it,and
you will be amazed.
Nine: food. Try to do a little better. I think you know what I mean.
Number 10 --grace. Grace is spiritual WD-40, or water wings. The
mystery of grace is that God loves Henry Kissinger and Vladimir
Putin and me exactly as much as He or She loves your new grandchild. Go
figure.
The movement of grace is what changes us, heals us and heals our
world. To summon grace, say, "Help," and then buckle up. Grace finds you
exactly where you are, but it doesn't leave you where it found you. And
grace won't look like Casper the Friendly Ghost, regrettably. But the
phone will ring or the mail will come and then against all odds, you'll
get your sense of humor about yourself back. Laughter really is
carbonated holiness. It helps us breathe again and again and gives us
back to ourselves, and this gives us faith in life and each other. And
remember -- grace always bats last.
Eleven: God just means goodness. It's really not all that scary. It
means the divine or a loving, animating intelligence, or, as we learned
from the great "Deteriorata," "the cosmic muffin." A good name for God
is: "Not me." Emerson said that the happiest person on Earth is the one
who learns from nature the lessons of worship. So go outside a lot and
look up. My pastor said you can trap bees on the bottom of mason jars
without lidsbecause they don't look up, so they just walk around
bitterly bumping into the glass walls. Go outside. Look up. Secret of
life.
And finally: death. Number 12. Wow and yikes. It's so hard to bear
when the few people you cannot live without die. You'll never get over
these losses, and no matter what the culture says, you're not supposed
to. We Christians like to think of death as a major change of
address, but in any case, the person will live again fully in your
heart if you don't seal it off. Like Leonard Cohen said, "There are
cracks in everything, and that's how the light gets in." And that's how
we feel our people again fully alive.
Also, the people will make you laugh out loud at the most
inconvenient times, and that's the great good news. But their absence
will also be a lifelong nightmare of homesickness for you. Grief and
friends, time and tears will heal you to some extent. Tears will bathe
and baptize and hydrate and moisturize you and the ground on which you
walk.
Do you know the first thing that God says to Moses? He says, "Take
off your shoes."Because this is holy ground, all evidence to the
contrary. It's hard to believe, but it's the truest thing I know. When
you're a little bit older, like my tiny personal self, you realize that
death is as sacred as birth. And don't worry -- get on with your
life. Almost every single death is easy and gentle with the very best
people surrounding you for as long as you need. You won't be
alone. They'll help you cross over to whatever awaits us. As Ram Dass
said, "When all is said and done, we're really just all walking each
other home."
I think that's it, but if I think of anything else, I'll let you know.
Thank you.
Syndicated from ted.com. With disarming familiarity, Anne Lamott tackles what most don’t like to consider. Her honest writing helps us make sense of life’s chaos.
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