Smash Notes
12 truths I learned from life and writing | Anne Lamott
A few days before she turned 61, writer Anne Lamott decided to write down everything she knew for sure. She dives into the nuances of being a human who lives in a confusing, beautiful, emotional world, offering her characteristic life-affirming wisdom and humor on family, writing, the meaning of God, death and more.
People
Notes
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Anne states the first and truest thing is that all truth is a paradox. Life is filled with heartbreak and beauty, and many other things that are swirled together.
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Help is an inside job. If it's someone else’s problem, you probably don’t have the answer anyway. Our help is usually not helpful, but toxic. Help is a sunny side of control and we should stop helping so much.
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On TED Talks Daily, Anne Lamott says radical self-care is quantum. It radiates out from you into the atmosphere like a little fresh air, and it is a huge gift to the world. She contrasts it with the futile work of trying to save, fix, or rescue someone else, or to get another person sober. If people answer by asking whether she is full of herself, she says to smile like the Mona Lisa and make a cup of tea for both of you. Affection for your own goofy, cranky, annoying self is home, she says, and that is where world peace begins.
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Everything that happens to you is yours to tell. Every writer writes terrible drafts, but they keep their butt in the chair. Writers do it by prearrangement with themselves, they do it as a debt of honor, and they tell stories that come through them one day at a time.
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Grace, or water wings. It is what changes us, heals us, and heals our world. Grace finds you exactly where you are, but doesn’t leave you where it found you.
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Laugher, because it helps us breathe again and again. It also helps us give back to ourselves. This gives us faith in life and each other.
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Wow and yikes. You will never get over these losses and you’re not supposed to. Their absence will be a lifelong homesickness. Death is as sacred as birth.
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