Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

I rolled my eyes: Oh, you again. It was my mental roommate.

If you do stick with writing, you will get better and better, and you can start to learn the important lessons: who you really are, and how all of us can live in the face of death, and how important it is to pay much better attention to life, moment by moment, which is why you are here.

Your inside person, your soul, the innermost baby in the nesting doll of you, is close by when you despair about your neck, your failing vision and drive, but your inside person also knows that with myopia, cluelessness, and tiredness comes grace.

I have just always found it extremely hard to be here, on this side of eternity, because of, well, other people; and death.

There’s just no way around this. Even when life sorts itself out and starts to work and we revel in what is working, the cosmic banana peel awaits. Without this reality, there would be no great art or comedy.

Almost thirty years ago, when I called my mentor Horrible Bonnie at my most toxic and hysterical, having screwed up as a mother, she said to me, “Dearest? Here is the secret: You are preapproved.” I kept asking her, “Really?”

Augustine said that those who sing pray twice.

Silence is medicine.

expectations are resentments under construction.