It is really not out there...

I really loved this........

Anne Lamott - Facebook Post 6/10/13

It is really not out there, whatever it is you are looking for.

I hate this! So resent this! I want my money back!

Yet this is the good news and the bad news, that you can't achieve, lease, buy or date what you are looking for. Nothing out there will fill the holes inside you.

I am watching a couple of dear friends on book tour, who are with major publishing houses, who are every unpublished writer's dream come true– earlier books that became best sellers, big reviews, loyal followers. Their books are the best work of their lives, major accomplishments, and yet, did not quite take off.

So my writer friends's hearts are heavy and they have been made to feel sort of like–failures. That's really the word, and they really have. It's so crazy! Beautiful books by highly regarded artists–it's all hopeless. It's Glengarry Glen Ross out there. Coffee is for closers!

Mamas, don't let your children grow up to be writers.

Wait, wait, I don't really mean that, because creation and discipline and radical self-care WILL bring you what you seek. Creativity–commitment to the creative spirit–is medicine.

Discipline is the path to freedom. This is another thing I hate, as I am drawn to sloth and over-consumption, and squandering whatever time I have left. But it is true, I promise. Discipline frees our spirits.

(Don't get me wrong. Naps are also divinely inspired.)

Radical self-care is what we've been longing for, desperate for, our entire lives–friendship with our own hearts. I am going to put on clothes that I feel really pretty in today. I am not going to make myself get exercise, because my feet hurt. I am going to put lotion on my darling, jiggly thighs, and drink lots of water, and take a nap with the dogs, and take my grandson to church so he can be with his colleagues and I can be with mine. I am going to hug and kiss everyone at St. Andrew to within an inch of their lives.

I'm going to buy a copy of both of my writer friends' books, and foist them into someone's hand, because they are both beautiful books, and they reflect well on me, and the people I give them to will REALLY owe me now. This is the most important thing! But mostly I'm going to do it because this will make me so happy.

I am going to email my writer friends and tell them how incredibly proud I am of them; no mother could be prouder. And I am going to remind them that they are my big super Spider-Man girls. What gorgeous books!

Giving is what we are starving for; not getting.

If you want to have loving feelings today, do some really loving things.

Trying to get the world and the public to give you these feelings of huge love and fullness is like trying to get Dick Cheney to grade your value as a human being.

It is not out there. The world does not have it to give. But we do. This is going to be a magical day.

Thoughts On Aging

I'm an old man! I look it, at times I feel it. I just don't know how to think about it. I'm not “getting older” or “aging”, at least in the sense that the actuality is approaching, is somewhere in the future, although soon. It's here. Indeed, it's been here for a while.

When I say that I don't know how to think about it what I believe that means is I don't know how to make peace with it…….to settle into it………accept it…….make it part of my world. I say “I don't feel old”, or more to the point, “I don't feel 68”, quickly followed by wondering “what does - or should - being 68 feel like? And that's fair, at least as far as it goes. I doubt that I ever consciously formed an opinion of what 68 would feel like, although I probably could have described what someone who is that age would look like. And oddly, it still surprises me when I look in the mirror that I look so much older than I expected. Along the way when I was younger than today, I knew people who were "approaching 70” and I suppose that to my younger self they looked “old”. And that may say as much as is factual about whatever consideration I gave to the matter at those times. I knew very little - if anything - about the interior lives of those people, except to the extent that what they said or did revealed their thoughts and / or attitudes. Some, for example, gave up driving at night, while others traveled less, settled in and seemed ready to accept, perhaps even welcome, a more constricted life. Their minds seemed inclined to mirror their bodies, and to demand less, to accept less, just because that's how it was. Knees and hands ached, hearing was less acute, vision for reading was declining or gone. But of what they thought - really, felt - about these things, I had no idea.

In truth, it's less that I don't know how to think about being old and more that I just don't want it - don't want to be old. I'm not ready. There's so much more I want to see, taste, do, know, learn. This feeling that my time is limited is frightening, and annoying……..inconvenient. I don't want to accommodate myself to it, if that means accept it and be less, want less, accept less.