Eat Pray Love

Someday, I will take a year off like Elizabeth Gilbert and travel to Italy, Australia, and Britain. Oh, and maybe Korea again. Or Argentina. Or the Caribbean Islands. I'm not sure yet, but I just want to travel.

This is going to be a very long excerpt... so be prepared. I tried to shorten it but I just loved this entire chapter. (57, if you ever want to look up the entire thing) I loved every single word in this, but I bolded the sentences that just really stood out... for your convenience.

"The search for God is a reversal of the normal, mundane worldly order. In the search for God, you revert from what attracts you and swim toward that which is difficult. You abandon your comforting and familiar habits with the hope (the mere hope!) that something greater will be offered you in return for what you've given up... We all agree that it would be easier to sleep in, and many of us do, but for millennia there have been others who choose instead to get up before the sun and wash their faces and go to their prayers. And then fiercely try to hold on to their devotional convictions throughout the lunacy of another day.

The devout of this world perform their rituals without guarantee that anything good will ever come of it. Of course there are plenty of scriptures and plenty of priests who make plenty of promises as to what your good works will yield (or threats as to the punishments awaiting you if you lapse), but to even believe all this is an act of faith, because nobody amongst us is shown the endgame. Devotion is diligence without assurance. Faith is a way of saying, "Yes, I pre-accept the terms of the universe and I embrace in advance what I am presently incapable of understanding." There's a reason we refer to "leaps of faith" - because the decision to consent to any notion of divinity is a mighty jump from the rational over to the unknowable, and I don't care how diligently scholars of every religion will try to sit you down with their stacks of books and prove to you through scripture that their faith is indeed rational; it isn't. If faith were rational, it wouldn't be - by definition - faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be... a prudent insurance policy.

I'm not interested in the insurance industry. I'm tired of being a skeptic, I'm irritated by spiritual prudence and I feel bored and parched by empirical debate. I don't want to hear it anymore. I couldn't care less about evidence and proof and assurances. I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water."


I guess this passage really hit home because everything that she explained is so relevant to they way that I feel. Leaps of faith are not necessarily logical, they force you to put your trust into something that you may not be sure is correct or real.



ONE MORE EXCERPT, BECAUSE THE BOOK IS SO GOOD.
"The other objective of religion, of course, is to try to make sense of our chaotic world and explain the inexplicabilities we see playing out here on earth every day: the innocent suffer, the wicked are rewarded - what are we to make of all this? ...[The Upanishads] are not even so sure that the world is chaotic, but suggest that it may only appear so to us, because of our limited vision These texts do not promise justice or revenge for anybody, though they do say that there are consequences for every action - so choose your behavior accordingly... Furthermore, the Upanishads suggest that so-called chaos may have an actual divine function, even if you personally can't recognize it right now: "The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident." The best we can do, then, in response to our incomprehensible and dangerous world, is to practice holding equilibrium internally - no matter what insanity is transpiring out there."


Sorry if this blog post sounds preacher-y, but the book itself isn't a book that talks solely about religion. It's a book about a woman's search for herself (cliche, I know) in three countries over a time span of one year. I'm still not done... I'm actually in the last country, Indonesia. But I think the central idea of the book is that in life, we all need balance. No overindulging. Whether as a little child, a high school student, a professional business(wo)man, an old retired senior... we all need balance - some time to eat, some time to pray, and, of course, some time to love.