At 33, I knew everything. At 69, I know something much more important.

By Anne Lamott

Contributing columnist

November 20, 2023 at 6:15 a.m. EST

Anne Lamott is an American novelist and nonfiction writer. Her latest book, “Somehow: Thoughts on Love,” will be published in April 2024.

Today I woke up old and awful in every way. I simultaneously cannot bear the news and cannot turn it off: It’s cobra hypnosis — Gaza, Israel, the shootings in Maine. The world is as dark as a scarab. I have two memorial services on my calendar this week. A dear friend is in the hospital waiting for a liver, dying. She keeps assuring me, “I ain’t in no ways tired,” and I say, “Oh, stop with that or I’m not going to visit again.” I’m exhausted just driving 90 minutes to and from San Francisco to see her.

My body hurt quite a lot when I got out of bed this morning, and I limped around like Granny Clampett for the first hour, until it unseized. Worse, my mind hurt, my heart hurt and I hated almost everyone, except my husband, my grandson and one of the dogs.

I don’t think I could have borne up under all this 20 years ago when I thought I knew so much about life. That was not nearly as much as I knew at 33, which is when we know more than we ever will again. But age has given me the ability to hang out without predicting how things will sort out this time (mostly — depending on how I’ve slept).

In many of Albert Bierstadt’s Western paintings, there is a darkness on one side, maybe a mountain or its shadow. Then toward the middle, animals graze or drink from a lake or stream. And then at the far right or in the sky, splashes of light lie like shawls across the shoulders of the mountains. The great darkness says to me what I often say to heartbroken friends — “I don’t know.”

Is there meaning in the Maine shootings?

I don’t know. Not yet.

My white-haired husband said on our first date seven years ago that “I don’t know” is the portal to the richness inside us. This insight was one reason I agreed to a second date (along with his beautiful hands). It was a game-changer. Twenty years earlier, when my brothers and I were trying to take care of our mother in her apartment when she first had Alzheimer’s, we cried out to her gerontology nurse, “We don’t know if she can stay here, how to help her take her meds, how to get her to eat better since she forgets.” And the nurse said gently, “How could you know?”

This literally had not crossed our minds. We just thought we were incompetent. In the shadow of the mountain of our mother’s decline, we hardly knew where to begin. So we started where we were, in the not knowing.

In the center of many Bierstadt paintings, you sometimes see animals grazing or drinking. They’re fine, they’re animals; they are just doing animals. But they are not the point — the point is the light. No matter how low you are, the light can reach you. It falls on animals, including us. This is positively biblical. Some of Bierstadt’s animals are lined up at the water as if they’re going to march onto Noah’s Ark. Or they’re huddled together as on a park bench, just hanging out. You have to wonder if the older deer are slightly surprised upon waking every morning, as I am, fumbling around for their glasses.

The animals never seem to have anywhere to go. I used to have lots of places I had to get to. I had to go out for this or that, and it was an emergency — graph paper! I suddenly, urgently, needed to drive to town for graph paper. Also, in the old days when there was something to celebrate, I’d go out to a nice restaurant with friends. To celebrate now, I might exuberantly skip flossing for a night, and maybe if the news is good enough, the hip exercises. Wild times.

In my younger days when the news was too awful, I sought meaning in it. Now, not so much. The meaning is that we have come through so much, and we take care of each other and, against all odds, heal, imperfectly. We still dance, but in certain weather, it hurts. (Okay, always.)

The portals of age also lead to the profound (indeed earthshaking) understanding that people are going to do what people are going to do: They do not want my always-good ideas on how to have easier lives and possibly become slightly less annoying.

Now there is some acceptance (partly born of tiredness) that I can’t rescue or fix anyone, not even me. Sometimes this affords me a kind of plonky peace, fascination and even wonder at people and life as they tromp on by.

The price of aging is high: constant aches, real pain and barely survivable losses. But each time my hip unseizes, it reminds me that this life is not going to go on forever, and that is what makes it so frigging precious.

Another gift of aging is the precipitous decline in melodrama. Enjoying how unremarkable life is takes practice and time, and then the little things start to shine and delight. Life gets smaller and in its smallness it starts winking at you. On my first day back in New Mexico recently, the high desert looked barren and brown. Pretty, yes, but a little dead. Then the tiny desert flowers, yellow, lavender, magenta and baby blue, made their way into my consciousness, and the earth’s shades of ochre and red started to warm me, and before long the formerly dead desert was alive and awash in dynamic, undulating streams of color.

Sometimes at the right or the top center of Bierstadt paintings is a trippy splash of light, often a mystical, jagged slash that breaks through dirty-looking or white-fire clouds. There might be bright reflections, or long, slanted fingers of sun shining down with religious airs, organ music playing softly in the background. Puffy rainclouds glow. All say, “Yes, there is the deep dark, but we have some light as well.”

Will my brothers or I inherit our mother’s Alzheimer’s? I don’t know. I do know that I recently parked in front of my house and sort of forgot to turn off the engine. Three hours later, a formerly standoffish young neighbor knocked on my door to tell me this, and I pretended to have known. I said the battery had been low and so I was letting it recharge.

“Ah,” she said.

Now she is sweet when she sees me. We wave to each other when we pass in our cars, reflecting a new affection. Reflections say, “In the dark, there’s still some light around. So don’t ever think things are too dark. We’re not going to give you the entire reserve, but we just want you to know it is there. And more may be on its way.”