Eat Pray Love: live love laugh

Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love is the guide for those seeking the triple threat of carbs, chakras, and romance. Fresh off a messy divorce and a rebound fling that couldn’t work, Elizabeth decides to shake things up by globe-trotting in search of the holy trinity of life’s pleasures: eating pasta in her bodyweight (and the most delicate, delicious meals antipastos, pizza, and pastries) in every corner Italy, praying (and meditating until her legs go numb) looking for God in India, and searching for peace and love (while holding onto a whimsical prophecy from a medicine man with no teeth) in Indonesia. This memoir is a delightful romp through plates of spaghetti, hours of healing and self-love, and stories of engaging, lovable people and their lives in Bali. Along the way, Elizabeth discovers that the secret to happiness lies in a balanced diet of spirituality and self-indulgence, with a good, generous side of love for good measure.

When I say I enjoyed this book — I love cherish adore this book, so much that I felt my smile reach my ear muscles on the bus reading because Elizabeth is hilarious. She manages to frame things so realistically with so much optimism driving her, picking herself straight up from such a devastating divorce. Against such a dark backdrop, her curiosity and cheerfulness braves her writing. As silly as the four month trips to three countries starting with the letter “I” seem (and framed into three parts and 36x3=108 chapters, which is the golden number perfectly divisible by a few 3’s, a spiritually significant number in several Eastern traditions according to Gilbert), there are lots of loving, truthful messages of that arise from the chaos, the people, the food, and life, to deal with the messiness life just somehow manages to throw at you. In Bali, the elderly medicine man (with no teeth) Ketuk taught her to make every part of her body smile in Balinese meditation, including her liver. Imagine making your liver smile.

I thought the memoir was sprinkled with so many cute fun fresh paragraphs. For example, this dialogue was interesting — emphasizing the journey being the destination itself in life.

“You have been to hell, Ketut?”
He smiled. Of course he’s been there.

(For context Ketut is a very old medicine man Elizabeth comes to see in Bali who does palm reading and solves distress and has had transcendent experiences but is still just an old humble man on his feet.)

“What’s it like in hell?”
“Same like in heaven,” he said.
He saw my confusion and tried to explain. “Universe is a circle, Liss.”
He said. “To up, to down — all same, at end.”
I remembered an old Christian mystic notion: As above, so below.
I asked. “Then how can you tell the difference between heaven and hell?”
“Because of how you go. Heaven, you go up, through seven happy places. Hell, you go down, through seven sad places. This is why it better for you to go up, Liss.” He laughed.
“Same-same,” he said. “Same in end, so better to be happy in journey.”
I said, “So, if heaven is love, then hell is…”
“Love, too,” he said.
Ketut laughed again, “Always so difficult for young people to understand this!”

And then also,

There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. ‘How much do you love me?’ And, ‘Who’s in charge?’ Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief, and suffering.

Another one,

Generally speaking, though, Americans have the inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that’s not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment… Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same as pleasure).

There is a sweet expression [in Italian]. Il bel far niente means “the beauty of doing nothing”. … The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life’s achievement. There’s another wonderful Italian expression: l’art d’arrangiarsi — the art of making something out of nothing.