Almost 10 years ago, when my life was in yet another one of those “transitions,” I made my way to what have been my version of a “place of worship:” a public library. And there, while looking around for a few books to take home, I ran across one of my very favorite writers, someone I discovered when I was in my early to mid-30s or thereabouts. I even took the time that week to write about my find that day (What happens when you lose the manual, see below).
Today, once again, while reading about other authors, other books, Anne Lamott’s work “popped up.” The first book, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope, is one of her newer books. But the second one, Bird by Bird is one of her earlier ones. I read that back in my late 30s. I agree with Maria Popova, (The Marginalian), this has to be on my top 10 list as well. I think now might also be a good time to revisit that book. Probably a book any aspiring writer ought to consider reading.
Oh, the (wonderful, mesmerizing) circular nature of life.
****
What happens when you lose the manual
For the last twenty-some years, I have tried everything in sometimes suicidally vast quantities – alcohol, drugs, work, food, excitement, good deeds, popularity, men, exercise, and just rampant compulsion and obsession – to avoid having to be in the same room with that sense of total aloneness.
— Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of my Son’s First Year
Some of us, as we grow up or older, as we gather sometimes overwhelming amounts of stuff and responsibility, lose track of those moorings that keep us from spinning out of control. We can’t seem to find the time for everything or is it that we choose not to make the time for those things we think we no longer need because we now have so much more.
Reading has always been my strongest anchor. Books the center I could always orient to because there I could count on finding a connection, a lifeline that eluded me in the real world. In the words of other humans I did not know and would never know, I often found my salvation and a tiny hold on sanity. If there was even one other human out there who could put into words the maddening sense of nothingness that has always lived in the center of my soul, then I too might one day find my voice, a way to speak my lonely song.
And if I could do that, then maybe one day, I could be someone’s anchor, someone’s tiny hold on sanity and that would give some purpose to my existence, enough purpose to make it worth living.
But somewhere along the way, I stopped reading. I got too busy playing at being a grown up, working hard to make a living, being a wife, a mother, a weekend warrior.
It was OK as long as I was so busy that I really didn’t have the time to think about, let alone feel that nothingness in the middle of my soul. I was finally being useful, doing all those things I was supposed to do, my life was filled with all the blessings anyone could ask for. If only that 4-year-old trouble maker would have just kept her big mouth shut and minded her own business. There was no pleasing her with all the normal grown up gifts I tried to quiet her down with. She wanted none of it, yet she wanted so much more.
And when it all fell apart, like Anne Lamott, I found other tasks I could turn into obsessions. First there was motherhood and God knows there is plenty to obsess over when you are responsible for another being you know you cannot possibly raise without breaking to one degree or another. I guess it could have been a lot worse.
Then when my child started getting older and no longer needing me so much, a scrawny, mangy, pathetic, discarded dog walked into my life and that random act of fate would consume my life for the next decade.
I was well on my way to rampant compulsion when the retired psychologist with the snotty dog waltzed into my life. The jury is still out as to whether that was a gift from heaven or another hellish detour.
Sometimes it feels like God has reached down and touched me, blessed me a thousand times over, and sometimes it all feels like a mean joke, like God’s advisers are Muammar Qaddafi and Phyllis Schlafly.
— Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of my Son’s First Year
God, I love Anne Lamott and today I am happy for having found her again.
Old friends make the nothingness a little less oppressive.
****
And now for a little more about these two books, first her thoughts on the nature of hope and then Maria Popova’s review of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life:
Almost Everything: Notes on Hope
“Almost everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, scared, and yet designed for joy. Even (or especially) people who seem to have it more or less together are more like the rest of us than you would believe. I try not to compare my insides to their outsides, because this makes me much worse than I already am, and if I get to know them, they turn out to have plenty of irritability and shadow of their own. Besides, those few people who aren’t a mess are probably good for about twenty minutes of dinner conversation.”
“This is good news, that almost everyone is petty, narcissistic, secretly insecure, and in it for themselves, because a few of the funny ones may actually long to be friends with you and me. They can be real with us, the greatest relief.”
“This is how most of us are — stripped down to the bone, living along a thin sliver of what we can bear and control, until life or a friend or disaster nudges us into baby steps of expansion. We’re all both irritating and a comfort, our insides both hard and gentle, our hearts both atrophied and pure.”
“How did we all get so screwed up? Putting aside our damaged parents, poverty, abuse, addiction, disease, and other unpleasantries, life just damages people. There is no way around this. Not all the glitter and concealer in the world can cover it up. We may have been raised in the illusion that if we played our cards right, life would work out. But it didn’t, it doesn’t.”
[Credit for quotations: The Margeninalian.]
Finally, let me introduce you to one of my top ten blogs: The Marginalian (formerly known as Brain Pickings). If you love books, literature, beautiful writing and beautiful artwork, you will love Maria Popova’s ‘labor of love.’
About The Marginalian and Maria Popova
“Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (public library) is among my ten favorite books on writing — a treasure trove of insight both practical and profound, timelessly revisitable and yielding deeper resonance each time. Lamott adds to the collected wisdom of great writers with equal parts candor and conviction, teaching us as much about writing as she does about creativity at large and, even beyond that, about being human and living a full life — because, after all, as Lamott notes in the beginning, writing is nothing more nor less than a sensemaking mechanism for life.”
“All I ever wanted was to belong, to wear that hat of belonging.”
Isn’t that all any of us ever wanted?
Anne Lamott Photo Credit: Zboralski, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Photoshop filters applied to original image.