And yet, outside my window, yellow roses bloom, and little kids horse around, making a joyous racket.

In general, though, it doesn’t feel like the light is making a lot of progress. It feels like death by annoyance. At the same time, the truth is that we are beloved, even in our current condition, by someone; we have loved and been loved. We have also known the abyss of love lost to death or rejection, and that it somehow leads to new life. We have been redeemed and saved by love, even as a few times we have been nearly destroyed, and worse, seen our children nearly destroyed. We are who we love, and we are autonomous.

Love has bridged the high-rises of despair we were about to fall between. Love has been a penlight in the blackest, bleakest nights. Love has been a wild animal, a poultice, a dinghy, a coat. Love is why we have hope.

So why have some of us felt like jumping off tall buildings ever since we can remember, even those of us who do not struggle with clinical depression? Why have we repeatedly imagined turning the wheels of our cars into oncoming trucks?

We just do.

To me, this is very natural. It is hard here.

There is the absolute hopelessness we face that everyone we love will die, even our newborn granddaughter, even as we trust and know that love will give rise to growth, miracles, and resurrection. Love and goodness and the world’s beauty and humanity are the reasons we have hope. Yet no matter how much we recycle, believe in our Priuses, and abide by our local laws, we see that our beauty is being destroyed, crushed by greed and cruel stupidity. And we also see love and tender hearts carry the day. Fear, against all odds, leads to community, to bravery and right action, to hope.

I wake up not knowing if our leader has bombed North Korea. And still, this past year has been just about the happiest of my life.

So yeah: it can all be a bit confusing.

On the one hand, there is the hopelessness of people living in grinding poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, and uptown Oakland. On the other, we pour our funds and time into organizations that feed and mentor people, teach in Uganda and Appalachia, show up in refugee camps with water and art supplies. People like us all over the world teach girls auto repair and electrical installation, teach boys to care for babies. Witnessing this fills me to bursting with hope. I have never witnessed both more global and national brutality and such goodness in the world’s response to her own.

And then there are our families of origin. Some of us grew up in the alternative universe of unhappy marriages, where we accepted as normal desperate parental need, and bizarre sights just short of a head on a stick. I’m sure your family was just fine, and the template of love you grew up with was kindness and mutual respect, delight in each other, patience with a spouse or a child’s foibles. But other families—just a few, here and there, hardly worth mentioning—were stressed, neglectful, fundamentalist, racist, alcoholic, schizophrenic, repressed. Brothers and sisters didn’t always survive. We became jumpy perfectionists.

T. S. Eliot wrote, “Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still.” We long for this, and yet we check our smartphones every ten minutes for news, texts, distraction.

I wish that before my wise father died, at fifty-six, he had written down everything he had learned here, whose truths he was pretty sure of. He wrote many books of knowledge but not so much truth. Along with several fatal flaws, mostly involving women, he had several excellent rules: Don’t be an asshole, and try to remember people’s names, especially those people with no power or cachet, and seek beauty through binoculars, books, records. But truth? What did he know that might have helped his children steer their boats a little straighter? Not so much. He eschewed the spiritual life, except as his human spirit was sustained by nature, jazz, books, wine. But life gave me mentors—poetry, pastors, the women’s movement, naturalists, and friends—who helped me come to know several truths of which I am almost sure.

Just before my sixty-first birthday, I decided to make a list for my grandson and niece, who are both exuberant and worried, as I was at their age and still am some days—in fact, right now.

My Dearest, I began: I have had a spiritual mentor named Bonnie for three decades now, who loves me and trusts God and Goodness so crazily that I sometimes think of her as Horrible Bonnie, because I cannot get her to judge me or abandon hope. For thirty years, she has answered all of my distressed or deeply annoyed phone calls by saying, “Hello, Dearest. I’m so glad it’s you!” I’ve come to believe that this is how God feels when I pray, even at my most awful.

So, Dearest: Here is everything I know about almost everything, that I think applies to almost everyone, that might help you a bit someday.

After writing those words, I stalled. What do I know?

From the book Almost Everything: Notes on Hope by Anne Lamott, © 2018 by Anne Lamott. Published by arrangement with Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

Anne Lamott's latest book, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope, will be available on October 16. And hear our interview with Lamott on our new podcast, Books of Your Life with Elizabeth.

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