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Tuesday, March 19, 2024

A brief tour on the book “Eat Pray Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert.

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An insightful story of the life and travel experiences of a woman in search of everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia. 6 years into her marriage and she wants out; she didn’t want to be married anymore. She doesn’t want children. It’s surprising because at 31, what else could a woman with a husband and an amazing career want from life. She was waiting for the time when she will feel the need to have a baby but the need wasn’t there. They had been trying to have a baby for a while, right when it will materialize, she didn’t feel the need for it anymore. She was grateful each time she saw her period because she felt it was nature giving her more time. She continuously tells herself that it’s a normal feeling and nothing is wrong with her. When she met with an acquaintance who finally became pregnant after trying everything possible to get pregnant, she compared the joy on her acquaintance’s face to the joy she felt when she found out that the magazine she worked for was sending her to New Zealand to write an article. She just couldn’t relate to the woman’s joy in the same way because she wants more and having a baby and being married wasn’t part of it. She doesn’t want a baby at least till she feels the same joy she felt when she was told she will be going to New Zealand.

The whole idea of “wanting out” baffles her because she took part in all the decisions up to that point. With how fed up she was of the life she was lived, she wonders if she truly ever needed those things and it posed a lot of questions in her heart that she couldn’t answer. All she was sure of is that she wanted out. She didn’t want to be married anymore.

She loved her husband but couldn’t stand him anymore. They were always fighting. He knew something was wrong with her because she started acting strange but she wasn’t saying anything to him. She never shared any reason why she didn’t want to be married to her husband as she said they were personal and sad. However, her issues contributed to some of the reasons she wanted out and his issues contributed more to the reason she wanted out. Seated on the floor of her home at 3:00 am, as she has done every other night prior, she cries bitter and snorts all over and she prays to God because the decision she’s about to make will lead to a drastic change.

Sprawled on the ground amid the crisis she talked to God for the first time. Her description of God is really amazing as it is not the typical Man in the Sky or some other conventional or traditional religious acknowledgement of a personality in a particular place. She talked to him and introduced herself like she was speaking to someone at a cocktail party asking and begging him repeatedly to help her and tell her what do to. After she had cried for a while, she stopped abruptly. She noticed she stopped crying then she heard a voice. The voice spoke to her quite calmly and with compassion and it was her voice but this time different from what she sounds like. The voice told her to get up and go to bed. She felt the need to do as the voice requested because it felt like the right answer at the moment because nothing else would have been the right answer from God. She went back to bed and seven months later she goes through a very horrible divorce.

The divorce process didn’t go as planned. She thought it would end amicably but apparently her husband didn’t make it easy on her. The whole process was as horrible, and crude as most divorce cases always are. They make you see a side of your partner, you never knew existed. With how badly she wanted out of her marriage, one will think that she wanted out to be by herself. But that wasn’t the case. After she left her marriage she went right into another relationship with a David whom she fell in love with deeply as she said. They made goals, vows, promises, and dinner dates together.

She finally confirmed that her marriage was indeed over when she didn’t go back to her husband after a passenger hijacked plane crashed into a building in New York City and it was close to their home so it should’ve been a good reason to spend some time with her ex husband at least to mourn with thousands of people who lost loved ones and property.

She cried with him but never went back. It didn’t take long for her demons to come back then she lost control of her peace. She started crying again and this affected her relationship with David as he started drifting away from her due to her new emotional tantrums, and the more he drifted away the more she needed him more. She needed him desperately but she wasn’t the woman he knew anymore. She moved out of David’s when their relationship became rocky. It was like everything was going bad sequentially.

She needed to find herself, get herself to do things that she always wanted to do, and find peace. Elizabeth had always loved Italian. She wanted to learn how to speak Italian – a language she found more beautiful than roses. She registered to take classes. She would later travel to Italy and spend a few months to perfect her treasured language. While in Italy she made new friends.Outside learning a new language, she felt the need for spiritual discipline. Although this was triggered by the picture of David’s Indian guru; but it felt good when she joined David for their weekly meeting and she started meditating every other morning after that.

Elizabeth was given the opportunity to travel to Indonesia; experiences gathered in the course of the journey will form the content of an article she needs to write. There in Bali she met a clairvoyant who told her about herself and what she should expect of her future. Part of her future as foretold by this old spiritualist was that she would come back and live with him and learn from him. She actually did go back to Indonesia after she went to India and spent a couple of months in a spiritual home, practicing being a vegan, learning different chants and prayers and finally letting go of her heavy burden. A large part of the memoir explained vividly her experience in 3 different countries and how she found what she sought.

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