Monday, June 14, 2010

eat, pray, love


I just finished reading the book Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.  I probably started reading it at least a year ago, but I could never get past the first couple of chapters.  When I was on vacation in South Africa, I decided that the long plane ride and the long road trips across the country would be the perfect opportunities to read a book that so many people have loved.  


The book, that is going to be a movie soon, was a story about a woman who had such low self esteem and could not live without a guy or without loneliness in her mind that she was on the verge of destruction.  I am in no way like this woman.  I have such good self esteem and I feel like I am a pretty independent girl.  By looking at the life of this woman, though, I saw how your mind can do detrimental things.  If you have bad thoughts, you will spiral into bad actions and even worse thoughts.  No matter how bad your life may seem at one time, the truth of the matter is...you are alive.  Only you have the power to change how your life is.
"There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under the jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I can read and eat and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts." 
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Everything around us is changing.  Commercials, television shows, the media, friends, enemies, family members.  Everyone is telling us how we should live our lives, what we should be concerned with, who we should be with, etc.  Eat Pray Love was all about leaving the modern world behind and finding a spiritual world within yourself.  If you can look past the pain and try to truly become and think HAPPY, then you can truly attain happiness.
"You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions." 
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

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