I recently finished Somehow: Thoughts on Love by Anne Lamott. The book was recommended to me by a good friend, in whose literary preferences I place much faith. Lamott's writing is pensive and glaringly honest, with a raw humor woven throughout that makes the read all the more personable. Some of Lamott's thoughts, frameworks for approaching life and love have stuck with me, and I wanted to discuss them here.

Possibly Lamott's most poignant perspective is religion as amorphous, or even as polymorphous. Lamott recounts various periods of her life, including her struggle with alcoholism and her long, non-monotonic recovery from it. When she needed it most, the Church gave Lamott structure, accountability, togetherness, and the painful act of being loved. In this way Lamott was and continues to be prototypically religious: she teaches Sunday school; she prays and holds faith in the acts of God; and she attends service.

Historically, I do not describe myself as religious. I am skeptical of the formalities and specifics of organized religion and instead tend to view belief systems as didactic narratives from which a semi-relevant moral framework can be extracted. I was therefore surprised to hear Lamott echoing a similar, albeit far more elegant, conceptualization of religion. On page 164, Lamott writes, "[My husband's] God expresses itself through music." It would be difficult to convey this point any more naturally. I see this as a functional approach to religion, one that does not necessarily deal away with but is agnostic of the structure of one's religion and chooses to celebrate its beauty and character. This quote asked that I pause and reflect, then, on if it is sensible to describe myself as non-religious. I no longer think it is.

Much of Lamott's writing reminded me of my grandmother. My grandmother served as a deacon for many years and has been devoted to her faith for the majority of her life; she has a profound network of beloved friends whom she has found through this. She is also similarly committed to radical love and evolution of the self. I have served as a dancer for 14 years. Many of the most important people in my life I have met and grown with through dance. I have learned to connect deeply with others, to contribute to a team whose whole is greater than its piecewise sum, to take correction and work like hell to improve, to regularly attend (a lot of) rehearsals, and to place faith in my teammates. I think that my grandmother, Lamott, and I would agree that dance is my religion.

I find that this all contributes to a broader point Lamott makes about the necessity of community—a notion of faith is nonsensical in the absence of others. Lamott emphasizes that one's religion, be it dance, Christianity, or bird-watching, is only given body by community and purpose by how it impacts others. I am of the belief that America today is more individualistic than ever before and to its own detriment^{[1][2][3][4][5]}. Lamott experiences some approximation of this at the personal scale: "The lone wolf watching it all from a distance is such a romantic image, but he is actually the most vulnerable in the pack" (120). Here and throughout the book she discusses the difficulty of letting yourself be seen imperfectly by others, of the infinite value derived from connecting with a human that has conquered the same struggle or simply enjoys the same thing as you.

I think Lamott would make an excellent Resident Advisor (RA). CMU has a culture of rigor, incessant hard work, and an unadulterated strive to maximize your individual marketability as a budding professional; as an RA for 20 first-year students, I make a monumental effort to implore my residents to do anything but this. I have dance rehearsals for 4-6 hours each week during the semester; taken together, these hours have been far more productive than the counterfactual homework sessions I could be doing. I walk out of rehearsal feeling rejuvenated, feeling full and healthy from having spent 2 hours in a room doing something I love with people I love. A key goal I aim to achieve as an RA is to convince my residents that life is about doing what you love, and if you do just that then all the rest will work out. I want my residents to honestly believe that it's worth joining Buggy, even if it uses up 12 of your week's precious hours, that it's better to call with your hometown friends and play video games on Saturday instead of doing homework. Hell, I tell them to become an RA because it's a uniquely rewarding job and then pretend not to see their rolled eyes. I'm grateful for having read Somehow: Thoughts on Love if only because Lamott's words either engender or revitalize the (possibly holy) spirit of committing to yourself, to community, and to love.