Anne Lamott: Falling Off the Tightrope

Everything in us teaches us to put up walls and get the surface just right and never go out without the armor on. Then we come into circumstances where the armor and the wall won’t work anymore--either because we’re so sick, or because someone we love intimately is so sick, that we don’t have the luxury of keeping the walls up and the surface looking nice and enviable.

It turns out to be, as my friend said about his facial disfigurement, an elaborately disguised gift from God. …I have had the shield come down and it’s like the wonderful Leonard Cohen song that there are cracks in everything and that’s how the light gets in. 

If I’m doing an event on stage and talking about the heart or talking about grief, I become very quiet. I’m not trying to be funny or cute or erudite. The response from the audience feels like those beams of love or like water coming into a tide pool.

I’m a very isolated person, left to my own devices, which is why I’m so grateful that I have a God and a spiritual life and a beautiful circle of friends and a community.

Left to my own devices, I’m like a tide pool, with these little crabs and animals struggling for survival. I run out of soul food or emotional nourishment. Then from the audience or from my church or whatever, I can feel the tide come in and bring with it little bits of seaweed or krill or nourishment. It’s gentle but it’s startling--the cold water is startling and it brings with it everything I need.

I’m a worried person and that’s why I think it’s such difficult work. Our whole lives have been practicing not being startled or surprised by water and by the baptism.  That’s why baptism is so profound—you’re submerged, you can’t breathe, and you sputter for a minute--but when you come out, you’re a different person.

I often feel exactly what you just said about claws. The idea of surrender offends me.

Oh, me too. Yet I know it’s a secret of life. I know that the only peace, freedom and spaciousness is in letting go.

I just wrote a piece about this—how at the Wailing Wall, the place exists for you to cry out praise or suffering or your stuckness.

If you look at photos of the Wailing Wall--I’ve never been there--what you see are little bits of paper stuck into the cracks between the limestone blocks. On those pieces of paper are prayer requests.

That’s such a deep way of surrendering, to write it down, and to give it over either to the wall or to a tiny little God box.  I actually wrote about that in Operating Instructions, when I was pregnant and I didn’t have any money or a partner. I didn’t know whether I could have this baby and be a decent mother.