Anne Lamott is the coolest aunt I've never had. Read her books, read her interviews, or read her Facebook statuses (yes, she still FB statuses) and it won't be long before you are a little bit better of a person for it. Currently, however, it is finals week, and the feels are out of control. May is a weird month in the alternate universe of college. Some of your best friends are graduating, you are three shots of espresso and two Adderalls deep, and you can't remember the last time you had a real shower: the big picture is getting little blurry. I'm there, I sympathize. And although I'm 19 and Ms. Lamott is 61, her wisdom pervades the boundaries of age.
Here are a few of her most influential life lessons to get you through the next five days (and maybe the next five years).
1. "Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.".
2. "There is almost nothing outside of you that will help in any kind of last way, unless you are waiting for an organ. You can't buy, achieve, or date it. This is the most horrible truth.".
3." Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. They are much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to their outsides.".
4. "Chocolate with 70% cacao is not actually a food. It's best use is as bait in snake traps.".
5. "Families; hard, hard, hard, no matter how cherished and astonishing they may also be. (See #1 again). At family gathering,s when you suddenly feel homicidal or suicidal, remember that in half of all cases, it's a miracle that this annoying person even lived. Earth is Forgiveness School.".
6. "Food: try to do a little better.".
7. "Grace: Spiritual WD-40. Water wings. The mystery of grace is that God loves Dick Cheney and me exactly as much as He or She loves your grandchild. Go figure. The movement of grace is what changes us, heals us, and our world.".
8. "God; Goodnesss, Love energy, the Divine, a loving animating intelligence, the Cosmic Muffin. You will worship and serve something, so like St. Bob said, you gotta choose. You can play on our side, or Bill Maher's, and Franklin Graham's. Emerson said that the happiest person on earth is the one who learns from nature the lessons of worship. So go outside a lot, and look up. My pastor says you can trap bees on the floor of a Mason jar without a lid, because they don't look up. If they did, they could fly to freedom.".
9. "Exercise: If you want to have a good life after you have grown a little less young, you must walk almost every day. There is no way around this. If you are in a wheelchair, you must do chair exercises. Every single doctor on earth will tell you this, so don't go by what I say.".
10. "Death, wow. So f-ing hard to bear, when the few people you cannot live without die. You will never get over these losses, and you are not supposed to."
11. "Grief, friends, time, and tears, will heal you. Tears will bathe, and baptize, and hydrate you and the ground on which you walk. We are on holy ground. Hard to believe, but it's the truest thing I know.".
