Eat, Pray, Love
參賽者：蔡怡然（金融五）
名次：特優
書名：Eat, Pray, Love
得獎作品：
“Eat, Pray, Love” is one of the New York Times Bestsellers I picked up couples months ago and couldn’t help but have to finish once I had begun. It tells a story about a woman, Elizabeth Gilbert, who not only did well in her career but also was assumed to be a perfect wife in her marriage. Just until her and her husband was ready to get pregnant, she realized all of this perfectness doesn’t fit her so well. She then filed for divorce and left their luxurious house in the suburb of the New York City, and decided to go on a trip to Italy, India and Indonesia for a year.
The title “pray” might sounds like one of those religious books that put God all across the book, but it was until Elizabeth suffered from her severe stress and woe that she started to question herself and ask for God. During the entire book, the God also acts as the answers she’s been asking herself. Unfortunately, even after divorce, new romance, and learning a new language, she still had a hard time to reel herself from the depression. It seems like she was losing the appetite for life and in need of a retreat to recover from spiritual crisis, so she asked for a year’s leave from her job and went on a solo journey as a self-discovery.
It was a year-long journey of self-searching which captivates me so well since I found it is just like every time when getting confused or depressed, I know I need to go somewhere alone, taste something new, and pull myself back together then maybe I can regain the composure and find a doorway to restart. Elizabeth’s journey, however, is not all about self-indulgence (maybe a little bit of spectacular food and luxury in Italy), and her reasons of being in these countries state quite clearly in the below from the book:
"I wanted to explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country, in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well," she writes. "I wanted to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two."
It’s never easy to leave old stuff behind and lead a life in a new city in another country even just for few months. Elizabeth found herself immersing in such exotic and incurably romantic country during the day; meanwhile, licking the past old wounds at night. She was there in Italy to experience pure pleasure, yet she found it hard to just let loose and enjoy “the beauty of doing nothing”, which she refers it to American culture where everyone is working so hard during the week that they accumulate those desires of seeking joy until the weekend. Eventually, those desires can’t be satisfied with just sitting at the backyard or enjoying the sunset at beach; instead, they can only be unleashed by much more intense amusement.
“Americans have an 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 park to wars, but that’s not exactly the thing as quite enjoyment…….Americans don’t really know how to do nothing. This is the cause of that great sad American stereotypethe over-stressed executive who goes on vacation, but cannot relax.”
Interestingly, I found this kind of inability to purely relax also applies to our Chinese culture here. In a sense, the work-hard-for-the-future spirit may all be inherent in us Chinese people thus we’d lost the ability of living in the moment for a long while.
If Italy is the place for Elizabeth to regain her passion, India and Bali are the places to find the balance between the passion and her past, which eventually led to her peace. It was also in India that she finally worked out to settle the memory of her ex-husband in a way of meditating. Maybe for things like this, they’ll keep happening in our lives, and even though forgiveness may never come from the others side or a terminated relationship still remains unsolved, we owe it to ourselves to take actions, move forward, and earn the happiness back.
To conclude, it is a universal story that we all have been there in terms of emotional trauma. At its best, the book shows a way of how she deals with it, and how she finally transformed and then let it go. As I’m trying to learn from the author’s experiences, I found the recovering process may not be easy and the situation cannot be applied for all of us, which means we can’t just do the same things in the book when getting hurt. What we can do is keeping exploring ourselves and find out what we always want to do and what’s there stopping us from doing it. Like the author put in the book, “Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it.”
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