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dc54eb0
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I danced alone for a couple of years, and came to believe that I might not ever have a passionate romantic relationship--might end up alone! I'd always been terrified of this. But I'd rather not ever be in a couple, or ever get laid again, than be in a toxic relationship. I spent a few years celibate. It was lovely, and it was sometimes lonely. I had surrendered; I'd run out of bullets. I learned to be the person I wished I'd meet, at which..
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man
relationship
couple
person
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Anne Lamott |
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Hope is not logical. It always comes as a surprise, just when you think all hope is lost. Hope is the cousin to grief, and both take time: you can't short-circuit grief, or emptiness, and you can't patch it up with your bicycle tire tube kit. You have to take the next right action.
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time
grief
hope
emptiness
surprise
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Anne Lamott |
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bf1e859
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Take care of yourselves; take care of one another.
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Anne Lamott |
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19cfe9c
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They cramp around our wounds--the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both--to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never have a chance to heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases we don't even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both limit us.
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Anne Lamott |
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b0c2b4c
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that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around. Writing
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Anne Lamott |
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Thurber was right when he said, "You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backwards."
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Anne Lamott |
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e435e17
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This is a difficult country to look too different in--the United States of Advertising, as Paul Krassner puts it--and if you are too skinny or too tall or dark or weird or short or frizzy or homely or poor or nearsighted, you get crucified. I did. But
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Anne Lamott |
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hope, as Chesterton said, is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate. Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously. So
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Anne Lamott |
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our psychic muscles. They cramp around our wounds--the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both--to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never have a chance to heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases we don't even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both limit us. They keep us ..
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Anne Lamott |
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9b7a0ad
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it may just be that you are developing a quiet doggedness. This is priceless. Perfectionism, on the other hand, will only drive you mad.
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Anne Lamott |
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7710a0e
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Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while
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Anne Lamott |
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it was about tragedy transformed over the years into joy. It was about the beauty of sheer effort. I
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Anne Lamott |
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Do it every day for a while," my father kept saying. "Do it as you would do scales on the piano. Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honor. And make a commitment to finishing things."
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Anne Lamott |
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bbc4cae
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As well as we know our grown children and relatives, we don't know how much energy they have to put into simply keeping their lives together at all.
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relationships
family
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Anne Lamott |
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5ee296c
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For thirty years, she has answered all of my distressed or deeply annoyed phone calls by saying, "Hello, Dearest. I'm so glad it's you!" I've come to believe that this is how God feels when I pray, even at my least attractive."
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Anne Lamott |
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There is flow everywhere in nature--glaciers are just rivers that are moving really, really slowly--so how could there not be flow in each of
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Anne Lamott |
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7f5b4d3
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The harm is in the unwanted help or helping them when they need to figure things out for themselves. Help is the sunny side of control.
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Anne Lamott |
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You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.
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Anne Lamott |
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911e751
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Forgiveness and mercy mean that, bit by bit, you begin to outshine the resentment.
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Anne Lamott |
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10af101
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Science, art, community, and nature make manifest that bad will or mistakes can lead to progress, like Bob Ross on his show The Joy of Painting reminding us that when we make big mistakes on canvas, we can turn them into birds--"Yeah, they're birds now!"
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Anne Lamott |
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950b163
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is something a friend once told me. She said that every single one of us at birth is given an emotional acre all our own. You get one, your awful Uncle Phil gets one, I get one, Tricia Nixon gets one, everyone gets one. And as long as you don't hurt anyone, you really get to do with your acre as you please. You can plant fruit trees or flowers or alphabetized rows of vegetables, or nothing at all. If you want your acre to look like a giant ..
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Anne Lamott |
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283997e
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Close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up. Then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse. Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar. Then isolate another voice, pick it up by the tail, drop it in the jar. And so on. Drop in any high-maintenance parental units, drop in any contractors, lawyers, colleagues, children, anyone who is whining in your head. Then put the lid on, an..
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Anne Lamott |
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0ae1263
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Of course, there will always be more you could do, but you have to remind yourself that perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.
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Anne Lamott |
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2400c87
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A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft--you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft--you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.
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Anne Lamott |
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1cd4e71
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The reality is that most of us lived our first decades feeling welcome only when certain conditions applied: we felt safe and embraced only when the parental units were getting along, when we were on our best behavior, doing well in school, not causing problems, and had as few needs as possible. If you needed more from them, best of luck.
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Anne Lamott |
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45efb06
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The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are.
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Anne Lamott |
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bf34f12
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Remember that you own what happened to you.
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writing
life
ownership
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Anne Lamott |
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c9bb17e
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M]ost of us have figured out that we have to do what's in front of us and keep doing it. We clean up beaches after oil spills. We rebuild whole towns after hurricanes and tornadoes. We return calls and library books. We get people water. Some of us even pray. 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. The equation is:..
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love
neighbors
hard-times
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Anne Lamott |
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6e572d6
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Love and goodness and the world's beauty and humanity are the reasons we have hope.
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Anne Lamott |
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8025df8
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Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating. When we hate, we can't operate from our real selves, which is our strength. Now that I think of it, this is such a great reason to give up our hate--as revenge, to deprive the haters of what they want.
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Anne Lamott |
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48c164b
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Niels Bohr wrote, "The opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth."
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Anne Lamott |
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b3d62b6
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I remind myself nearly every day of something that a doctor told me six months before my friend Pammy died. This was a doctor who always gave me straight answers. When I called on this one particular night, I was hoping she could put a positive slant on some distressing developments. She couldn't, but she said something that changed my life. "Watch her carefully right now," she said, "because she's teaching you how to live". I remind mysel..
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Anne Lamott |
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c2ecd97
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As I've said before, I believe that when all is said and done, all you can do is to show up for someone in crisis, which seems so inadequate. But then when you do, it can radically change everything. Your there-ness, your stepping into a scared parent's line of vision, can be life giving, because often everyone else is in hiding--especially, in the beginning, the parents. So you come to keep them company when it feels like the whole world i..
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Anne Lamott |
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1fac5e7
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I absolutely don't buy into the current mania for tidiness and decluttering. For a writer, piles of papers and notes are a fertile field. Keep all those books you read in college, or had certainly meant to read. Keep all those clothes that last fit during the Carter administration. Or give them away. It's for you to choose. You has value.
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Anne Lamott |
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360f4e9
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The world can't give that serenity," he said. "The world can't give us peace. We can only find it in our hearts." "I hate that," I said. "I know. But the good news is that by the same token, the world can't take it away."
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Anne Lamott |
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4328dfc
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My good ideas for other people so often seem to annoy them.
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Anne Lamott |
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00ec893
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death is not the enemy; snakes are. And cheese: it is addictive and irresistible. I have had three kinds so far today.
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Anne Lamott |
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d1b7ce4
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The bakery, on the other hand, was a family's understanding that a kid didn't have to do or achieve or own anything more for the world to care, and even delight in her.
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Anne Lamott |
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c93105a
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We can change. People say we can't, but we do when the stakes or the pain is high enough. And when we do, life can change. It offers more of itself when we agree to give up our busyness.
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Anne Lamott |
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ecc74fe
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You never get over certain losses, but the anguish part eventually ends, and it all just sucks for a while. There were moments when I understood that there was nothing much I was going to understand or figure out. There was simply the present moment, awareness, impermanence, birdsong, love. There is no fixing this setup here. It seems broken and ruined at times, but it isn't: it's simply the nature of human life.
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Anne Lamott |
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e116ee5
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God makes a way out of no way.
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Anne Lamott |
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52c2ae4
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Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something--anything--down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft--you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft--you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or..
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Anne Lamott |
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79bc0c7
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So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human?
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Anne Lamott |
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cc2ce8a
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What helps is that we are not all crazy and hopeless on the same day.
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Anne Lamott |