I know it's been quite a while since my last post and I'm sorry about that. Sometimes it takes people longer than it should to get their act together. Apparently I am one of those people. This whole two jobs, 50-plus hours a week thing, has taken some getting used to.
In what little down time I've had I've tried to do some reading. Only this has backfired too because I've ended up paying the library late fees. This would average out to about the amount it would actually cost to purchase a book. I'm pretty sure the library police are still coming to arrest me, taking me to library jail, because I've had the book that long. I thought, through my time of transition and exhaustion, I needed a book that would inspire me to be great -- or at least give me some life insights. I decided to check out "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert.
This book was on the New York Times Best Seller List for weeks and weeks, which everyone was raving about almost a year ago. Obviously I jump on the bandwagon a little late, too.
The reader follows Gilbert on a first-person account after a messy divorce and a botched love affair, to three different locations: Italy, India and Indonesia, living abroad in each place for four months. Here she searches out different lessons in her life. She wants to experience pleasure, become closer to God and find balance. In Italy she learns the language of love and finds pleasure through relaxation and eating amazing food. In India she lives at a Buddhist Temple learning the ways of her guru, what it means to find inner peace and how to let go of past guilt. In Bali she finds a new love, new friends and studies with a medicine man.
There's nothing like shoving a lot into one year. I would never do this. Although I have always wanted to go to Italy, I have no desire to live in Bali learning from a medicine man or studying at a temple in India eating a vegetarian diet, meditating and doing yoga -- even though I do love yoga.
If you can call what I do really yoga. I mean we do all the actual yoga moves -- the down dogs, up dogs, cobras, planks, warriors, etc. -- but I'm guessing the level of yoga intensity is probably beginner, if not pre-beginner. It's definitely not yoga on the level of doing it in India with gurus-in-training around helping you find your "spiritual enlightenment." (Even though it is intense enough to kick my butt every week.)
However at my yoga class the other day, my very insightful, organic, earth-mother teacher did have a pearl of wisdom for us, "If you don't take care of yourself, it's impossible to take care of others."
She is so right. If I don't take care of myself by exercising, reading (and finishing) books in a timely manner and writing, then I'm not going to be in any state to take care of others in my life who are very important to me. Hey, it may not be a guru telling me these spiritual insights, but I do have a yoga teacher and what she said did hit home -- and that's something to write about!
