Eat, Pray, Love, Live

After reading several blog posts about the audacity of Elizabeth Gilbert to write a book about her selfish journey through life, I finally had to sit down and put my thoughts together into a post - instead of leaving it in one horrendously long comment. Disclaimer: not that I don't respect the opinions of those who posted it, and Samira just set off my thought train on it. Her, her family, and her blog are amazing- even when you love Eat, Pray, Love like I do :) .

I personally am a HUGE fan of Eat, Pray, Love - the book and the movie. I've also read her second book, Committed. I've also read a book called Halfway to Each Other - a woman who takes her family on her journey to find herself. I've seen women who try to find themselves over and over again by getting out of a marriage to not want to understand how they end up finding themselves and figure out how to do that IN my marriage, not out of it. I read everything with a grain of salt, and that book more so than others, but at the same time I love that she reached out to reawaken her passion for life. Because, what is EVERYTHING in life? A marriage, a big house, a good career? Or is there something more? The fact that she made the effort to do this intrigues me. She had no kids, and it sounds like her husband and her were already miserable (I love that she respectfully doesn't go into detail about what happened, and doesn't place blame), so there wasn't much loss there and it doesn't sound like she made anyone else miserable about her decision. Halfway to Each Other is a happy medium where a woman DOES have kids and still lost herself in her home life, and seeks to find out without (barely) letting those go.

Speaking of Elizabeth Gilbert's marriage, who knows what happened. This interesting article on her husband discusses his path after their divorce - a worldwide human-rights activist trek, and now married with two kids. Part of the paths they both took afterwards suggested they could've taken their path together, something that encourages me when I see people who go their separate ways - noting that their separate ways could have been together if they had only realized it.

I love Alexandra Gekas last paragraph:

"Whoever he was, it sounds like two people who met young, but who grew apart. Two people who had passion for life, but whose passion took them in different directions. It just would've been nice if she'd depicted him that way." - To further that, I think it would've been nice if they realized they could find those passions together.

Another article from a 1998 interview with Elizabeth Gilbert suggests he wanted the "perfect" life and she had a different view of having everything - one of which was not spending $10,000 on a wedding but saving it for a nest egg. They ended up spending the $10,000 on the wedding, a give in I'm speculating she was to regret many, many times the years over. Her second wedding was intimate version with just the people who were most important in their lives present.

Jessica Olien, cynic turned not-quite believer but non-judgemental nonetheless, talks about her own cynical journey to discredit Elizabeth Gilbert and the flocks of women who followed her footsteps to Bali, and finds out that to judge one another, you might just find yourself following in their foot steps. I agree wholeheartedly with her final piece of advice: "...if I could tell those women one more thing, it would be that maybe they should stop looking so hard. Because if there's a romantic cliche that's held true -- for Elizabeth Gilbert, and now, for me -- it's that bliss usually happens when you aren't hunting it down."

Regardless, it takes all different kinds of people to make up this world and I've seen too many marriages end after years of "having it all" to slight her for actually trying to find out what went wrong, even if that meant a selfish journey that she shared with the world who hopefully wouldn't make the same mistakes she did. Sometimes we need to be selfish and be there for ourselves in order to be there for someone else.

That being said, I also greatly enjoyed Halfway to Each Other and feel like I took more applicable lessons away from that - though lessons that are more difficult to put into words. My one sentence summarization for Eat, Pray, Love would be find your passion and live it, no matter what it takes. And for Halfway to Each Other would be find your passion in your life you already have and live it, no matter what it takes.