eat pray love

I finished reading “eat pray love” by Elizabeth Gilbert last week. I had tweeted that I was finally reading the book and a friend mentioned that she couldn’t get past the first section of the book on Italy because she felt the author was “too whiny.” Truth is, yes, she was extremely whiny, up through half of the second book. OK, she had bouts of whininess throughout the book.

You can’t blame her though. She’d been depressed for two years plus, had an awful divorce and painful break up. She went on this journey just as it had all happened in order to get over it. So the entire time she was in Italy, she ate and wallowed. It wasn’t until she had her spiritual breakthrough in India that she came to terms with everything.

As I read, I thought about my life and how lucky she was that she could take a year off to get her life back on track. Let’s face it, a regular joe-schmo like me can’t do that. I can’t afford to take a year off to travel on a spiritual journey. I have bills to pay and have to work to cover those bills. No one’s going to hand me a book advance to travel and find myself.

I have to find ways to create this peace for myself here, in this hectic world of work, commitments and friends. I’m quite happy to say that my misery is not near the level of her depression and sadness. Not even close. But it is imbued with negativity and whininess. This blog is a clear example of that. I’m resolved to change that. The past year has been hard, but it could’ve been so much worse. I have many things to be grateful for and I just need to fight to change my life.

Bad things are going to happen. That’s life. But when bad things happen, we can’t dwell on them and be overcome by them. All we can do is accept them and move on. We’re the only ones that can do that. We learn from our mistakes, from the bad things. They become a part of us, but don’t define us.

I want to surround myself with positivity. Have fun and enjoy myself. It won’t be easy, especially considering my last post was about the resentment building up inside me. But while my home life may not change right now, I can work to change other parts of my life; the social aspects. I’ve already begun limiting the people I spend time with. By that I mean people that don’t add anything to my life, but only bring me down. And somehow, these past few weeks and months, my social calendar has been a flutter. There’s hardly a weekend I’m actually at home and that’s a good thing.

My life may not be what I thought it would be at this age, or what others think my life should be, but all I can do is take one day at a time. Find happiness and joy and take them day to day.

I leave you with an excerpt from “The Sleeping Beauty Proposal” by Elizabeth Strohmeyer.

“I’m beginning to learn that anything worth having in life begins by taking a risk – love, marriage, childbirth, even loving one’s neighbor as thyself. Risk is the universe’s way of pushing us to become more than what we are. Risk is faith at the edge. Risk is the pulsating essence of life.

Without risk, we are automatons going through our days with no purpose or meaning. We are safer, perhaps, but we are also, ironically, closer to death."