Anne Lamott: When Love Feels Unbearable
Anne Lamott is the eternally wise, prescient, and deeply human writer so many of us wish we could call in times of need. Anne is the author of 20 books—yes 20—including the New York Times bestsellers, Help, Thanks, Wow; Dusk, Night, Dawn; Traveling Mercies; and Bird by Bird, which is essential reading for every writer. I refer to and cite her advice all the time. Anne is also a Guggenheim Fellow. Her latest book—and the subject of today’s conversation is Somehow: Thoughts on Love that revolves around the William Blake line: We are here to learn to endure the beams of love—and how hard this is. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM ANNE LAMOTT:
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival & Courage
Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: Will you start by telling us the Sunday school story about the girl who needs her mother at night, or doesn't need her? Yes.
ANNE LAMOTT: yeah. I tell all my Sunday school kids this. There's a little girl who's having a terrible time falling asleep, and she keeps calling for her mom to come in. Her mom comes in the first couple times. She's sweet and friendly. Oh, don't be afraid. God is here with you. You're not alone. And then leaves. After about five minutes, a little girl calls for her again, and the mother grows increasingly more impatient, and just to make a long story sort of short, the last time she comes in, she goes, you're not alone. God is here with you in this room, and the little girl says in a tiny voice, I need someone with skin on. And of course I tell it because I think that's who we're called to be in the world is God, God's love with skin on.
ELISE: And what does that mean? I mean, this whole book, right, is about love and how hard it is to accept in some ways or to be I don't know What do you think is harder actually accepting love or being love in the world?
ANNE: Oh, it's so easy for me, maybe because I'm a woman to be love in the world and to be the, you know, the flight attendant to the world and bring people various forms of love, like a cup of tea or a listening ear or, you know, alone or whatever they need. Box of See's chocolates, but to receive it, you know, there's that whole chapter at the end about what William Blake said that we're here to learn to endure the beams of love and the ways phrases it that way is because it's hard. It's not natural to us. We have to learn to do it over time. Love sneaks in. I mean, love will win. But but we do resist. It's scary. It makes us soft. It makes us vulnerable. And everything we were taught was to keep the armor on.
ELISE: Yeah I love that line about a friend of yours who says I think that when you meet him, you're always meeting his bodyguard
ANNE: Yes, Duncan Trussell said, when you first meet him, you're meeting his bodyguard. And you know, when you meet me for the first five times, you're meeting my bodyguard. I'm trying to be funny and charming and adorable. And I desperately need you to love me and like me. Then Little by little I let you in and I take off a little bit of the chain mail and I see how that goes and then I let you in more and more deeply.
ELISE: And do you let people love you?
ANNE: I do. But I'm old, you know, I'm going to be 70 and I've been sober almost 38 years, 37 years and a half. And and people just ground me down because First of all, you just come to understand as you get older that that's really all there is. I've seen so, so many people through the end of their life and they're not thinking about their accomplishments. They're not thinking about their good reviews or their promotions or their claims, they're just thinking about and sharing about memories of love and gratitude and amazement of love and who they've loved most and who loved them in a way that really surprised them. So, you know, love will win.
ELISE: Yeah. Do you feel like there's a turning point? I think about my life, and I can't say that I think love is it's driving, I mean I have two small children, I don't know if I even have the time to contemplate what that would mean. It feels like not practical.
ANNE: Oh, I know. Well, one of the reasons that we are not taught how to love and to endure love is because it doesn't make life more efficient, like you're saying. And also they don't grade for it.
ELISE: Right?
ANNE: I also, I wrote a book on mercy a few books ago. I forgot what it was called. Hallelujah. Anyway, which is the name of a gospel song. But in and I talk about how we came and you know, with little children, little children can be beasts, but they're also so generous, just naturally they just have these really open hearts. They haven't had to put the chain mail on yet. And they're really merciful. And I don't know if your kids are in school yet, but when you start sending them off to preschool and kindergarten, they start giving their food away. They give away half of it and you don't want them to. You made it for them. It's calories and it's nutritionally balanced and they give half of it away to somebody who forgot their lunch or hates their lunch. And so in Hallelujah, anyway, I talked about how we put it away in a drawer by about the age of five or maybe six, first grade on the blacktop. And because it's not efficient and they don't grade for it. And I was suggesting in this book that you go open the drawer and you practice being merciful because the reality is, and you know this, if you want to have loving feelings you've got to do loving things. You know, figure it out, it's not a good slogan. And there's no magic wand. But if you want to change your day around and have really loving feelings and an open, generous heart, which is what heaven is is like, you do a loving thing. You have five minutes to call your most annoying aunt and just say, I was just thinking of you. Love you. I can't talk, but you're on my heart and I hope you have a nice day. Right? That was probably under 30 seconds. And then they talk, then they start to get into full weird. And then by the time you're a little older, you have ways to get off the phone. You pretend your kid is crying or whatever.
So, It is hard, but everything in us, it's like with my writing students, with the Bird by Bird crowd, everything in us wants us not to write, you know, and no one in your family is going to be glad to hear that you're writing a memoir, and it's not convenient for anyone in your family when you start setting aside an hour or two, four times a week to write instead of helping them get organized and it’s just the same as when you become a more active person of love and you say, No, we don't have time. You've got your to do list. And instead, it's like three and four and five minute things. It's when you're driving to the CVS to get graph paper for your kid, you swing by Jesse and Judy's house. Jesse's 90 now and he's still walking every day. And you drop off a really handsome new kerchief for him so that he'll feel a little bit more dashing, you know, on his daily walk. Mother Teresa, who I love, despite all the horrible Christopher Hitchens attack on her and stuff, she said, none of us can do great things, but we can all do small things with great love. And if you do small anonymous things, or you do small drive by things that you swing by and you bring somebody a baggie full of those tiny mandarin oranges, cuties. And you drop them on the porch, small things with great love changes the whole world. It's quantum.
ELISE: I want you to tell the story about the sparrow and the horse. But first, I love just the recounting of you dropping off these bags of essentials, right, to people who are in house. But also that I think sometimes we romanticize the delivery of our love, the God's love we deliver in our souls and then sometimes it's not always received with love, but it shouldn't stop the Encounter.
ANNE: Right. Well, yes, that happens. But you are not responsible for the results. You can't get other people to respond a certain way or feel a certain way or even listen, you are only responsible for bringing the very best ingredients in your heart and your spirit and your car and your purse and your kitchen to people because it's on your heart to help them just a little bit. There's a story in somehow about these purple cellophane bags of of products that might make it a little bit easier to stay clean when you live on the street, if you're homeless, if you're unhoused. And you know, it's stuff like floss, which is probably going to get thrown away or Kleenex, two pairs of black socks, a warm cap, some body wash, some shampoo that you could use in the bathroom at the health food store. And you can't get people to want to use it, but you bring your best stuff and you say here, I just thought, I know it must be hard in the winter to stay warm. And I brought you two pairs of black socks and a cap and I don't know if you could use this toothpaste, but here it is, and just you take care. And that's your business, and whether he or she leaves it on the bench or chucks it into the first garbage can is not your business. That's between him and, you know, his or her relationship to life at that point. Nothing you can do about that.
ELISE: Yeah. But I think so many of us feel like sometimes like our acts of service have to be transactional, right? Like you need the affirmation or the praise or the consolation that you've really sweetened someone's day. And so it's hard to break that, that cycle of credit. It's the same thing, right? That you were just saying.
ANNE: It is. But the reason I wrote this book is because love in our popular expression and reception is transactional. And that is not going to save the world and it doesn't save us one day at a time. It really just makes everything worse. Like the world is not working. You can look around and see that the world is not working, right. People are terrified. People are grief struck. People are scared to death for their kids or nieces and nephews futures. That's why I wrote love actually was because I felt like I knew 10 or 12 things that have always worked before during our very darkest times and community love and radical self love and forgiveness when it's really hard and these small, small acts of love and picking up litter and you know, returning emails and library books. And I knew they had always worked before all through my life up until today. including today, is that no matter what my son and grandchild's future holds, they'll work for him, for them, they'll work for your kids. And I want to get those down on paper for when I'm gone, because the world is going to be telling them that there's something they can do, or buy, or lease, or achieve, or dominate, That is going to make things work for them in the brave new world that lies ahead, and it won't. It's just a crop. It always has been, and we always bought into it and love is not transactional. Love is just love. There's just this energy in us and around us. And for those of us who believe in a divine love, there's kind of a umbilical cord from our inside heart cave to A greater reality of lovingness and warmth and generosity that we can plug into. And so I just wanted to get this down on paper because my son and grandson are going to try everything they've seen in the ads and commercials, but it won't work. And that's where all change comes from what you're trying not working. All change comes from the pain.
ELISE: I think about sort of your life and work and I've read a fair number of your books and I'm so interested in sort of the armored atheist father and the way that you came to faith. You have these communities that are sort of up and down, right? Like, grounding up, grounding down.
ANNE: Right, right.
ELISE: Is that the prescription that we all need? I mean, you have been through particularly dark nights but we're all in a dark night, collectively, and we have been. What do you think we need?
ANNE: Well, I don't think you need a sacred community or a community or a recovery community. But those work for me. And I'm a total introvert and a lone wolf. And I prefer to be alone. And I love to be at my house. And my husband would go out and hear live music every night for the rest of his life. And I would never leave my house again, except to go shopping. But plus now I have the Amazon. I leave the house to go pick up my Amazon packages. But, I think we do need contact, we need connection. The women in recovery taught me that the opposite of addiction isn't sobriety, it's connection.
ELISE: Mm.
ANNE: And I think we need connection. I think we usually need a connection to a power greater than ourselves, which could be anything. It could be the local mountain. Our mountain, Mount Tamalpais, was holy ground to the coastal Miwok who lived here before we did. And a lot of people I know have gotten sober turning to the mountain.
ELISE: Mm.
ANNE: Just say help, you know, the first great prayer and I do think anything we can find in the world that helps us unhook from our own crazy, judgmental, self deprecating minds, and if we have connection to other people who have what we have, i. e. an eating disorder, i. e. a mental illness, a grief that won't heal, a loss we've been through that was unsurvivable, and we're just barely surviving, well, we can find others who know what we're talking about. God, we're halfway home.
ELISE: Mm. Yeah, it's beautiful. And it's funny, you write, " I still struggle with equal parts bad self esteem and grandiosity." And I love that. It's like my friend who says, I'm the biggest piece of shit that the whole world revolves around which I think is quite universal. Is that not, in some ways, description of all of us, this way that we've become so locked in our own...
ANNE: oh, absolutely. I think everyone I've ever known, or at least anyone I would ever be willing to sit next to at dinner, knows that ping pong game. It's just how we were raised. And that part of us thinks, Oh my God, I'm a fraud. You know, if people got to know me too well, they'd, run screaming for their cute little lives. And if people knew my secret live, oh, people knew what I thought, you know, thank God my mind doesn't have a PA system. And then the other part of us thinks we're different. We're better than we're a little bit morally superior than, we're not insane like this other group I could mention that I won't and on and on. And so the healing has to do with the lessening of both of those things. I was raised by a very intellectual atheist father and mother too, and they just thought anybody with a rich spiritual life was delusional, you know, and they thought that we were better than. And we were liberals, we were progressives, we were intellectuals, they were educated, I'm not particularly, but they were, and yet at the same time, they had terrible self loathing, you know, my mother had a massive eating disorder and was heavy her whole life, and my father drank a lot and had affairs, and so, you know, it's like that dualistic personality, and so the solution, and I write a lot about this, and somehow, it's the hardest work we do, Which is that radical self love and the self forgiveness, you know, I have forgiven basically, everybody, eventually, and then there's still me. God, I've made so many mistakes. Ugh. Breaks your heart to think about what you could have done just so much better. And at some point, you do the deep dive into whatever it is that is letting you not with making you unable to forgive yourself, whereas you would forgive someone else who had done those same things.
And it goes without saying that we talk to ourselves and judge ourselves the way we would never ever judge anyone else we know. So you start doing the work, whatever form that takes of you know, lightening the F up, and just realizing it's hard here. It's hard here for everybody, no matter how great they look on the outsides. And what we do is compare our side, our insides to their outsides, and we just assume they don't have these bad thoughts or this judgment of everything and everyone. And then once you get to know everyone, we're all in the same boat, you know. It's hard here. We got very weird training and upbringings. We weren't taught that we were unconditionally loved. I mean, love in our family is very conditional, when we behaving a certain way and making the parents look good and bringing home A's. The love flowed.
ELISE: Yeah. I highly relate to performative childhood and intellectually snobby progressive parents who I love very much, but they think I am out to lunch. Because I mean was raised Jewish. I love Jesus. I'm here for all of it.
ANNE: Oh, yeah.
ELISE: Certainly nature. It's interesting to think about action versus thoughts. I wrote a whole book about goodness and how we persecute ourselves as women and then police each other. I mean, my thoughts run rampant about you know, I judge myself harshly for being annoyed or having feelings of moral superiority, et cetera. But then when you think about someone like Jesus, it was sort of about right action, right? Orthopraxy, like, what are you actually doing in the world versus what are you thinking? Why are we so mental? And how do you feel? I mean, it's kind of the substance of all of your work, is your thoughts versus your actions, maybe?
ANNE: yeah, yeah. Well, I want to point out that two things you said are synonyms for God. One is nature, which is spells great outdoors, which spells God. And one is goodness is a synonym for God. As I understand good people in recovery who don't have a God or higher power use good orderly direction. That's sort of the Buddhist way. The next right thing. And then my favorite is The great universal spirit, which spells Gus. So I often think about Gus and the spirit of love and goodness and sacrifice. I mean, I'm a lot older than you, but in the fifties and sixties people talked about sacrifice to love what sacrifice a lot with our fathers had all done in world war II and it was just a thing that sacrifice and the common good. And you never hear those words anymore, but at any rate, It took me about 10 years of being clean and sober before I realized that figure it out was not a good mantra because I was raised by overeducated intellectuals and what we did every morning we had a little statuette of the, I think, of the New York Times and we bowed down before it before we were given breakfast. We worshiped intellectual prowess and we figured things out. Also you needed to make decisions that needed to be the right decision because you weren't supposed to change your mind. Again, I was about 10 years sober before I realized, Oh, you get to change your mind. You get to stop doing this. You get to stop seeing that person. You get to put away that book, put away that article, It was just practice. I didn't know. I thought all I knew to do was to figure things out and to kind of bash and crash my way through obstacles and clench, and you can't figure out your way through a clenched fist, you know, you take the action, you release, you release, you release, but learning to surrender to something else besides your own rattled uptight mind takes practice, you're not going to solve your problems in your crises, in your wounds. You're not going to heal your wounds that were caused by this rattled, uptight, mean mind with your uptight rattled mean mind, you know, and as I said earlier, the willingness comes from the pain.
And so when you create enough pain for yourself, you might say the most miraculous thing of all, which is what? Like, what? And you put down your weapons and you come over to the winning side, which is gentleness and surrender and not knowing my husband has a whole riff he does on how I don't know is the portal. It's the portal to a more expansive life. It's a portal to more love. It's a portal to more Freedom and just spaciousness and breathing. Another thing is, my husband is named Neil Allen, and he wrote a book called Better Days, which is based on his work with the inner critic, which in bird by bird, I called radio station KFKD, I won't say what KFKD is the acronym for, but it's that radio station in our brain that we're talking about that out of one speaker that we're different. We're morally superior. We're right. The most important thing. And out of the left speaker that we're losers, we're doomed, and we're frauds.
And Neil's work in Better Days is teaching you to notice that voice, that he identifies as a parasite that we started listening to at about five or six, that kept us alive. It said, don't run out into the street. You know, it said don't swim farther than you're able to, but I'm very good with traffic safety and I don't swim out into the road, but I hear the inner critic. I hear this voice tell me not to try that. It's too scary not to keep doing that. It tells me I'm about to be busted. I'm going out on a 16 city book tour, I'm going to get some terrible reviews and that's just real life. And my inner critic has a field day with that instead of just my higher self says, well, it comes with a turf. I'm a writer, you know, but the inner critic starts to freak me out. And what Neil's work in better days is, is saying, Oh, it's just you. It's this thing that kept me alive. I don't need, it's not truth. It's just, well, what Freud would call the superego. And so I've learned, I identify it. I go, Oh, it's just you. Why don't you just go wait in the library? There's really good reading lamps in there and anything you might want to read and I'll come get you if I need you. Then I can get on with preparing for this kind of arduous three weeks on the road. And I can get today's work done and I can do everything that will bring me peace. And I'll get some exercise. I'll get outdoors. I want to go do this really, really sweet favor for someone who's not doing very well. I want to take a nap, but the inner critical says, you don't have time for a nap. Well, I need a nap, you know, and I'm also, it's been daylight savings time, the time change and that when you're older, it takes you about three weeks to catch up.
So the inner critic says, no, I'm sorry. It's got its arms crossed. You really don't have time. And then I say, Oh, at first I fall for it every time. And then I go, Oh, it's you. Why don't you go wait in the kitchen and I'll come get you if I need you? And it just doesn't want to be killed, but you're never going to kill it. But why don't you wait in the kitchen, have a nice cup of tea. I'll get you if I need you. So I do that. I met Neil seven and a half years ago. He taught me that process on our second date, which is why we had a third date.
ELISE: His audience.
ANNE: he knows his audience because all along I thought it was truth, that I'm going to fail or that I'm not good enough. It's this voice that keeps me small. I've heard it my entire life. This is somehow it's my 20th book and you'd think that I would be getting somewhere, but you know, we start out each day anew. You know, Augustine said your relationship with God starts over every morning when you wake up, you don't have a bank account of faith. And same thing with having some decent self esteem, some appropriate self esteem and a very gentle and tender feeling about yourself. You start over every day. After you and I stop talking, I'm going to start hearing things that I meant to say, or where I went on too long, for instance, in this answer, and the voice is going to, and I'm going to go, Oh, it's just you. Why don't you go wait...
ELISE: I'm here for it.
ANNE: yeah, yeah.
ELISE: like everyone who engages with you or reads your books is like, oh, Anne is my friend, and I would just like her to be my Sunday school teacher. It's interesting that you said sacrifice and how we don't have that anymore as a cultural value, because its root is sacred, right?
ANNE: It is.
ELISE: And I feel like that's missing, you know? It's like father, Richard Rohr talks about the cosmic egg, you know, the me story, and the we story, and the story. We're missing our story in some ways. Whether that's secular or religious, it's this like finding our way back to each other in some ways. And maybe it is through sacrifice. I don't know.
ANNE: I think it's true love. I just think it's true love. I mean, you know that you would, without blinking an eye, would give up your life for either of your children, right? I mean, a split second, not even a full second. And that is appropriate sacrifice. Now, a lot of women were raised with this black belt codependence. Where are Our value came from this very toxic sacrifice, where, speaking of the egg, my mom, who is from Liverpool, so it's partly English, but it's partly just female in the 50s, 40s, 50s, 60s, she never once in our family ate the broken fried egg. You know, we had fried eggs for breakfast, she ate the broken fried egg. And that was when Ms. Magazine came out when I was 16. I started realizing we are going to start sharing the broken fried egg. I had it well for the last 800 days. So maybe dad could have it today. You know, maybe my brother John could have it today. And and so there's the coded black belt toxic, malignant codependence of getting our value from what other people think of us and how we're faring in the world's eyes. And that needs healing. That needs either 12 step work or therapy or work at your temple or church or mosque. And then there's sacrifice where you just become a person who's, really willing to give at a level that surprises you and maybe you're a little uncomfortable with because it's coming from such a sweet, pure place in your heart. You're just giving away what's been so freely given. And most of the stories and somehow have to do with me starting out kind of gritchy and clenched and uptight or bitter and somebody like either stepping on the cosmic banana peel and getting a reset from that, from landing on my butt or from running into somebody and me either experiencing their love in a way that makes me uncomfortable or finding myself giving way more love than I ever expected to. You know, it's kind of an ambush. Oh my god. I didn't want to do that.
ELISE: Do you remember you write about Francis Sepford and the book of unapologetic and it goes back to this idea of the broken egg, right? And how women eat the broken egg but you talk about sort of this flaw in the genetic and social coding. And I loved this part, because you write about this part of us, it's always trying to get away with more while obsessing about how unfair it is that others get away with so much. And it's the part that wants the bigger cookie and glares at someone who takes it before I can. I mean, you're a broken egg story for me, so I'm always like, with my husband guarding the food because I want the children to go first, but I'm also conscious of the fact that like, yeah, I want to be snaking their pizza too. Like, how dare you?
ANNE: Yeah, it's just human nature too. It's just human nature. And if you grew up in a family, I'm not sure I know anyone who did, but you grew up and the men and women, the wife and husband were respected equally. And the father had huge respect for his wife and her life's work. And the children were raised with unconditional love. And even if they didn't do very well on this or that, they were loved just the same, just soared and brought home all A's and trophies and whatnot. If you grow up like that, maybe you don't have it, but otherwise you do, you know, this feeling of that there's not quite enough, that it's a zero sum game that, you get what you really, really need. And then it's like, pull up the ladder. I got mine. Right? And the radical, and Richard Rohr and Ram Dass and every holy spiritual teacher way is that you want to find yourself? Give. We're not hungry for what we're not getting. We're hungry for what we're not giving. And then at the same time, you watch this old pattern of guarding what you have and of watching your mother take the leftovers and your mother taking leftover food and taking the piece of cake that broken half while it was being served and taking the lesser car and taking whatever time is left for her to get her needs met. And so, you know, all truth is a paradox. And that's really what I believe is that I really, really give, but because I'm healing the codependence, I'm healing the self doubt, I'm giving from a place that is abundant because I live in gratitude. I notice how much I have been poured into, crazy love from a number of different directions. And I give that away. I don't give from my place of deprivation and, you know, anorexia. And I've been anorexic. I've been everything. I've been heavy and I've been anorexic. And I'm so used to the anorexia of kind of like not putting out too much because people might take too much of me and not taking in too much because it might make me be beholden to that person or it might make me soft. So, you know, it's like there is so much healing available out there. And it comes back to what I've said, what you said is that the willingness comes from the pain, that you have a moment of awakening. You wake up and you say, I don't know how long I'm going to live. You know, we're all on borrowed time, but I don't want to live like this anymore. I want to live free. I want to live freer. I want to live bigger.
ELISE: So is the practice in your mind, going back to the broken piece of cake, the broken egg, to build your comfort with that love? Is that the practice of the sacrifice? Or are you supposed to, and you just said it's all a paradox, or are you supposed to say, Oh, I think I want the full piece or I want the full egg.
ANNE: It's hard.
ELISE: how do we balance it?
ANNE: it's really hard. Well, I'll tell you something that the sober women taught me and it's going to sound very corny like ABCs that your kids would bring home preschool, but it's a three A's. This is a tool in my tool belt. The three A's: first is the awareness. You're doing it again. You know, you're taking the leftovers, you're taking the broken stuff, you're waiting to see if everybody else's needs are met before yours are, your need for solitude, your need to be alone, your need for quiet, your need to just lie around reading for half a god damn hour without being interrupted. Do we have ketchup? You become aware of it. You become aware of the judgment. You're doing it to yourself again. You ate too much. I ate too much yesterday. My pants are really tight. Awareness. What's the thing that is not love? What's the thing that is not easy going? The second A is acceptance. Okay, of course I have that. Of course, my mom had an eating disorder. I've had 60 years of eating. When I was a child, in the 50s and early 60s, a quarter bought you five Hershey bars and I ate all five. I was an emaciated child. And so of course I accept that. I feel funny if I think I ate too much or whatever. And I accept it. I accept this codependence. My mother had it. It was her value system, was getting her value met by other people's eyes. I just accept it. I'm under a lot of stress right now. in pre publication. Of course I'm thinking these old scary bad body thoughts. They're kind of malignant comfort zones.
I have an owner's manual for bad self esteem. I just accept it. And I talk to myself in the acceptance. I go, Oh, Annie, of course you have that. It's okay. It's just part of the mix and you have a lot of incredibly beautiful things about you too. And then the third thing, it's the hardest thing, the third A is action. And you do the loving action. You do what you would do for me. We've never met in person. You'd put your hand on my shoulder and you'd rub it and that might segue into a really gentle neck rub and you'd go, Oh honey I think I know what you're going through and it's very hard. And you're an introvert with a public life, and you're scared, and I'm gonna just get you a cup of tea, you sit right here, and you would talk to yourself that way, it almost always involves a cup of tea, or a hot bath, or a walk, a ten minute walk when you think you don't have time for a ten minute walk. Now my husband Neil, in his book Better Days, and I said in my book, I stole it. Everything that is true and beautiful about life can be discovered on a 10 minute walk. So that's one of the actions is a 10 minute walk. You get outside, you look up, that resets you. You look at the trees, you look at the sky. You never look up and go, Oh, that's a medium moon. You know, you look up and you go, Oh my God. My pastor used to say, okay. That you can trap bees and mason jars without lids on because they never look up. They're on the bottom. There's a drop of honey and they just walk around the bottom bumping into the glass, but all they have to do is look up to fly away. So, that's the action step for me. And that, those three A's saved me more often than I can tell you.
ELISE: Beautiful. Well, from one introvert to another, I would never leave this corner of my room if I could. Good luck on that tour. I feel for you. My heart breaks for you.
ANNE: Thank you.
ELISE: God. And congrats. Thank you for everything you do.
Well that was a thrill. If you’ve never read Bird by Bird, whether you’re a writer or not, it is such a profound book about putting anything out in the world and expecting the world to change in response and finding out that everything stays the same. It’s the most grounding, humble experience and as she says, she uses this William Blake line, she writes that she’s used the line so long that she likes to think it’s hers, which is: “We’re here to learn to endure beams of love.” And I am going to read a passage, she writes: “And to bear the beams of love: What a nightmare. No thanks. The cold vibrating spaced inside us protect us and keep us on our toes. Love breaks your heart and love makes you soft. It gets in past your Brooks Brothers armor and makes your skin as permeable as the little green tree frog my friend Caroline found in her shower. If you practice enduring people’s bewildering love for you, it will change you molecularly: it loosens you, gooses you, warms you. Bearing the beams of love can dislodge ancient sachets of joy, pain, shame, and pride trapped inside you, and make you smell strange and funny, like soup.” And that is the end of Somehow by Anne Lammot, which is so beautiful and will be your best friend on an afternoon. It’s fast and slim and full of wisdom and funny stories. Everything she does makes me laugh, which makes it all go down easier in the end. Alright, I will see you next week.
