Smart
People
“When
people know you too well, they eventually see your damage, your weirdness,
carelessness, and mean streak. They see how ordinary you are after all, that
whatever it was that distinguished you in the beginning is the least of who you
actually are. This will turn out to be the greatest gift we can offer another
person: letting them see, every so often, beneath all the trappings and
pretense to the truth of us.”
Anne
Lamott (Dusk Night Dawn: On Revival and Courage, p.147; Riverhead Books, New
York, 2021)
One
thing about Anne Lamott’s writing is that she does not try to hide anything
about herself—people who are serious about their sobriety, as she is, learn to
tell the truth no matter what. She exposes her frailties and her constant insecurity
in every book she writes because she knows that the instant she starts “pretending
to be” anything grandiose, she’s headed for the long fall. And the landing will
not be graceful.
Two
nights ago, I tried to cook dinner for the group of women I’m with at the lake.
The house has a “smart stove” and we spent twenty minutes trying to figure out
how to turn on the oven and set the temperature. The stove just kept beeping
and telling us it was HOT!
Finally, we called the owner and she walked us through the steps. Just so you
know, I’m the only one of these women who doesn’t have either M.D. or Ph.D. after
her name. I was gratified to know it wasn’t simply that I’m a techno-dork;
everybody else is too! We had a good laugh about having too many degrees to
operate a smart stove.
We are
also at the age when words escape down some little rabbit hole just when you’re
about to say them. You’ll be in the middle of a perfectly ordinary sentence and
suddenly, the next word just drops off your tongue like a stone. Sometimes someone
else can supply it for you, and always, out of compassion or familiarity, they
allow you time for the word to resurface. It’s one of the most frustrating
things about having an old brain—they misplace things.
Allowing
others to see your humanity, your frailties, your ignorance is the best way to
know whether they are true friends or not. Real friends stick around, help you
out, laugh with you. We do ourselves and others a favor when our personality is
wide enough and strong enough to show its lame side—to show what it doesn’t
know as well as what it does. If we pretend to never make a mistake, to never
come up blank, it puts a barrier between ourselves and others. One of the
hardest things for smart people to say is “I don’t know,” but it’s the most
important thing as well.
I hope
you have friends with whom you can let down your guard. It’s lifesaving, and soul
restoring to be in a place where everyone knows all your parts—strong as well
as weak, smart as well as dumb. It’s all good because everyone has those parts—even folks with letters after their name.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment