Eat Pray Love

Here's my follow-up to the raving review I started for Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I finished the book this past week. Do not read this blog post if you want to read this book without a spoiler.... I don't write book reports/reviews very often, so don't expect this to sound professional. :) Eat Pray Love is a writer's account of her experience of travelling for a year after a rough divorce and another broken relationship. She decided to travel to Italy, India, and Indonesia for 4 months each. In Italy, she wanted to explore pleasure and worldly enjoyment, in India, devotion and divine/spiritual transcendence, and in Indonesia, balancing these. In reading the first two sections, I was very inspired. I felt that I could relate to a degree with this woman (Liz)'s angst in the wake of broken relationships, and I found some of her own realizations about herself to be familiar to me. I was moved by Liz's search for happiness independent of a man and for her yearning for a deeper spiritual experience. And she really took action to seek these things by leaving her everyday life and comforts for a whole year. The change she experienced was really inspirational. It really made me very hopeful. But I forget that this is a real life person's account, that she is human, she's not perfect, and she wouldn't necessarily do everything the way I would. This brings me to the part of the book about Indonesia, where Liz sought to find the balance between pleasure and devotion. There are parts of her experience there that I thought really showed how she had a new perspective on life and was past the self-centered state that is nearly impossible to avoid in depression. She befriended a financially-struggling medicine woman who was a single mother of one, who had also recently adopted 2 orphans. The relationship Liz built with this woman, and then her desire to give her whatever she could was lovely. The part that bothered me about this part of the book was that she met another man. She had decided to avoid being in a relationship with a man for the whole year, but when she met this man in Bali, she followed her heart and decided that she needed to be with him. I don't have a problem with her being flexible about her plan for her life. I don't think we can always be that concrete about how we think things should go in our lives. Sometimes circumstances take us by surprise; unexpected opportunities arise. I guess the issue that I have is that this relationship she developed with this man seemed to be very much based on sex, and then when her time was up for her to go back home to New York, they decided to continue the relationship by just meeting up every now in then, in New York, back in Bali, or in Brazil or Australia where his family is from. She had written off marriage based on her past experiences, and got involved in this relationship where neither person was willing to give up the current life to be with the other person or fully commit. It just seems to me, after all that spiritual exploration and connecting with God and healing from her depression and past hurts, that I would hope she could again be willing to completely open herself to real love. The way this book ended, it just felt like a letdown. I guess I can't expect a real life person to figure everything out completely in a year. I can be idealistic. I also can't expect that every person would value the same things as I do. To me, relationships should not be about sex, and that ultimately, to really love someone is to commit to be with them for life through marriage. Apparently, not everyone shares the same values as me (obviously). I shouldn't be surprised, but like I said, I can be idealistic, and when I was so inspired by what happened in Liz's life in Italy and India, I hoped I would be equally inspired by what happened in Indonesia. However, I still think the book was great, because the changes she experienced were hugely significant in that year. I think I will read the book again shortly, which is something I never do. I really would like to think further about how I can maybe challenge myself in some way, so that I can also find happiness in new ways and find God in new ways.