Finding Meaning in a Crazy World

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Anne Lamott on How We Endure and Find Meaning in a Crazy World

We live in a culture of dividedness and fragmentation of the self. When we contemplate what it takes to live a full life, we extol mindfulness and wholeheartedness. But being wholehearted is only sufficient if your heart is your whole self; being mindful is only sufficient if your mind is all you are. We are, of course, so much more expansive than our hearts and our minds and our perfect abs, or whatever fragment we choose to fixate on. But we compartmentalize our experience in this way, divide it into fragments, as if to divide and conquer it. I've written before about our resistance to speaking of the soul, of which those of us who uphold secular ideals of rationalism are especially culpable. And yet I find, over and over, that the fullest people – the people most whole and most alive – are those unafraid and unashamed of the soul.

The soul has had no greater champion in this age of fragments thanAnne Lamott – a writer of exceptional lucidity and enchantment, with a rare way of becalming our modern anxieties and ancient anguishes, from grief and gratitude to the perils of perfectionism to how we keep ourselves small with people-pleasing. In Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair (public library), Lamott lays bare the deepest, most worn yet most resilient threads of the soul and laces out of the loose ends an extraordinary lattice of assurance and grace – assurance that there is hope for awakening in ourselves "a deeper sense of immediacy or spirit or playfulness" amid the slumber of ordinary life, and for those moments when we feel like all such hope is lost, the grace of trusting "that we do endure, and that out of the wreckage something surprising will rise."/.../