WaPo Op-Ed: Living For The Unremarkable Moments

Washington Post Op-Ed:  Living for the Unremarkable Moments, by Anne Lamott (Author, Somehow: Thoughts on Love (2024)):

Age grants us permission to be curious about every ordinary day.

In the year since I began writing these little columns on getting older, I’ve seen death up close a few times. One man I know has the same devastating, angry variety of Alzheimer’s that my mom had. A dear old girlfriend has the gentle, spaced-out version, as if dementia had freed the tender prisoner all locked up since childhood. When her mind grew soft, we saw the prison bars of a lifetime collapse.

I would like to put in an order, while they’re still available, for the latter.

But we have no choice in the matter. These days, all I can bank on is love. Much of the rest departs. Even our bodies shrink smaller and then smaller. Carl Sagan said about all of us, “For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.” This is doubly true for the elderly.

Love emerges flagrantly as the real coin of the realm. The people I’ve spent significant time with at the end of their lives do not talk about their degrees, promotions or having successfully kept their weight down. They talk about the times and places of love. Loving memories are the fields in which we walk with them near the end. ...

How to live? On any unremarkable day, I wake up more curious than I used to be about what’s in store. Today is going to unfold as it is going to unfold. I am not going to be able to corral it like a horse. I hate this, but less and less. Now I wake up a little confused: Where am I? Oh, yeah. Right here, today, always. I pray simple prayers.

When I got sober many years ago, an old guy told me that while most people in recovery pray a formal, beautiful, spiritual prayer upon waking, the old-timers just say, “Whatever.” And rather than another set prayer at bedtime, they all just say, “Oh, well.”

How to live? Simplicity is so rich. My unremarkable days might seem infinitely uninteresting to a youthful person. But older age has given me permission to do what I always dreamed of doing: sit around reading, walk, putter. Busyness and fear constrict us in youth; fresh air and nature free us in old age.

My pastor said you can trap bees at the bottom of a Mason jar without a lid because they don’t look up and fly away. So I look up. ...

Thank you for spending this year with me. ...

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Other op-eds by Anne Lamott:

• Do Not Mess With The Very Old (Aug. 4, 2024)
• Gentle Is The Joy That Comes With Age (July 7, 2024)
• Invisible And Exposed — But Adaptable, As Only The Old Can Be (June 9, 2024)
• The Dressing Room Encounter That Made Me Get Real About Aging (June 2, 2024)
• Lifelong Lessons In Coping With Fear And Humiliation (May 19, 2024)
• It’s Not So ‘Terribly Strange To Be 70’ (Apr. 21, 2024)
• The Two Best Gifts Of Aging? Softness And Illumination.  (Mar. 17, 2024)
• A Superpower of Older Age: Powerlessness (Mar. 3, 2024)
• Age Makes The Miracles Easier To See (Jan. 28, 2024)
• At 33, I Knew Everything. At 69, I Know Something Much More Important (Nov. 26, 2023)
• It’s Good to Remember: We Are All On Borrowed Time (Nov. 3, 2023)
• I Pray. But I Don’t Want To See A High School Football Coach Praying At The 50-Yard Line. (July 10, 2022)