Help, Thanks, Wow: A Good Read

There are 2 kinds of people I don’t really understand: those who stop for geese in traffic and/or those who do yoga. I’m married to someone who I’m pretty sure does both. I know he does yoga, and I’m betting he’s never honked his horn to discourage geese from entering the roadway.

I do this regularly. I would never hit a goose once he was in the roadway, but I have no qualms about laying on the horn. This makes my “relax & smell the roses” blog posts hypocritical, I realize. My content appears to be aspirational in nature. No one does all the healthy, peaceful, life affirming things I recommend. No one. Even me!

But there are some people out there who have a higher batting average on this “positive life habit” stuff. Author Anne Lamott is one of those people. I love her because, just like me, she doesn’t appear to come by this healthy living stuff naturally. I just read her latest book Help, Thanks, Wow.

It’s a book about how to pray. But it’s not a religious book. It’s about how to start a dialogue with a higher power and how to find your best self in the process. It doesn’t matter if that self is Christian or Jewish, Buddhist or Muslim. In the book Anne details her rather unorthodox approach to these conversations. These dialogues are funny and real and often sound like she’s talking to an irreverent friend.

This was news to me. I didn’t think a legitimate conversation with a higher power could sound like that. But for some people, it does. It’s made me think about prayer in a whole new light. If you’re pondering this sort of thing, Lamott’s book is definitely worth a read. It’s short and full of underline-worthy sentences.

You might even emerge from the reading with the kind of inner peace that inspires you to beckon geese into the roadway. And once you’ve waited the hour for the flock to leave the roadway you’ll drive to a yoga studio where you will embrace the poses, the more painful and boring, the better. This hasn’t happened to me yet, but I just finished the book last night. I’ll keep you posted.