Congratulations to author and mentor from afar, Anne Lamott. No, I have never met her, though we were once in the same building together when she was speaking. I read this week that she married recently, for the first time, at age 65. This caused me to revisit some of her work, including her TED talk from a few years back:
https://www.ted.com/talks/anne_lamott_12_truths_i_learned_from_life_and_writing?language=en
To celebrate her marriage, I thought I would go back over her twelve truths learned from life and writing. I only take issue with 1, and it relates to chocolate, so probably doesn’t matter that much in the scheme of life. In her introduction she notes that each of us is a “mixed grill of happy anticipation and dread” which I think pretty much hits the nail on the head. Anyway, Lamott’s Truth #1:
“All truth is a paradox. Life is both precious, unfathomably beautiful gift and, and it’s impossible here…. 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.”
It occurs to me that perhaps the only thing we can all agree on is her last sentence, it’s not an ideal system. But it is what we got, which leads to Lamott truth #2: “almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes – including you.” Indeed, unplugging or rebooting, the “CTRL/ALT/DELETE” buttons of life (whatever they are for each person), come in quite handy.
It occurs to me... 