Forget the cheese

I recently finished reading Anne Lamott's book, "Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith." My favorite passage came in the opening pages of the book which I wanted to share with you here. It's good food for thought, and contains kernels of ideas that have been rolling around in my head quite a bit these days:

"There is not much truth being told in the world. There never was.
This has proven to be a major disappointment to some of us. When I was a child, I thought grown-ups and teachers knew the truth, because they told me they did. It took years for me to discover that the first step in finding out the truth is to begin unlearning almost everything adults had taught me, and to start doing all the things they'd told me not to do. Their main pitch was that achievement equaled happiness, when all you had to do was study rock stars, or movie stars, or them, to see that they were mostly miserable. They were all running around in mazes like everyone else.

On the other hand, sometimes you encountered people who'd stopped playing everyone else's game, who seemed to be semi-happy, and with it, who said, in so many words, I saw the cheese, I lived on it for years, and it wasn't worth it. It was plain old Safeway Swiss."

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Here's to holding onto what's true; and remembering that achievement does not equal happiness.