“If you are like me, you’d like to be able to understand and describe life better. Then you could manage and control it and maybe realize a small profit or advantage. But that would be death.
And when you see that you have mostly stopped trying to do this, and are instead trying to remember to step outside when you’re buggy and to look up, you say “Wow.” You mindlessly go into a 7-Eleven to buy a large Hershey’s bar with almonds, to shovel in, to go into a trance, to mood-alter, but you remember the first prayer, Help, because you so don’t want the shame or the bloat.
And out of nowhere in the store, a memory floats into your head of how much, as a child, you loved blackberries, from the brambles at the McKegneys’. So you do the wildest, craziest thing: you change your mind, walk across the street to the health food store, and buy a basket of blackberries, because the answer to your prayer is to remember that you’re not hungry for food.
You’re hungry for peace of mind, for a memory. You’re not hungry for cocoa butter. You’re hungry for safety, for a moment when the net of life holds and there is an occasional sense of the world’s benevolent order.”
(From Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers by Anne Lamott)
