Books & Contemplation

So a friend of mine lent me a book last weekend called "Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia" by Elizabeth Gilbert. I haven't finished it yet, and I'll post a full review after I do.

At first, I thought it was going to be way too 'touchy-feely' for my tastes, and while there are parts where I just roll my eyes and go "ugh," for the most part I like it - and here's why. Except for the obvious differences between the author and myself (like she has the means to travel the world for a year and "find herself"), there are a lot of similarities in our stories. When in her early thirties, she was very unhappy and realized that her marriage wasn't working (because she didn't want kids and her husband did). One thing struck me about her realizations about children (contemplations that I had with myself several years ago when I finalized my decision that I did not want kids) that I'd like to share in an excerpt here because they are so eerily similar to the thoughts I had - which were, themselves, an attempt to reconcile social pressures/expectations/assumptions vs. what I really wanted for myself. Also, her experience of divorce (though hers the typical contended, bitter rivalry and mine totally not) have their similarities as well:

Getting out of a marriage is rough, though, and not just for the legal/financial complications or the massive lifestyle upheaval (As my friend Deborah once advised me wisely: "Nobody ever died from splitting up furniture.") It's the emotional recoil that kills you, the shock of stepping off the track of a conventional lifestyle and losing all the embracing comforts that keep so many people on that track forever. To create a family with a spouse is one of the most fundamental ways a person can find continuity and meaning in American (or any) society. I rediscover this truth every time I go to a big reunion of my mother's family in Minnesota and I see how everyone is held so reassuringly to their positions over the years. First you are the child, then you are a teenager, then you are a young married person, then you are a parent, then you are retired, then you are a grandparent - at every stage you know who you are, you know what your duty is and you know where to sit at the reunion. You sit with the other children, or teenagers, or young parents, or retirees. Until at last you are sitting with the ninety-year-olds in the shade, watching over your progeny with satisfaction. Who are you? No problem - you're the person who created all this. The satisfaction of this knowledge is immediate, and moreover, it's universally recognized. How many people have I heard claim their children as their greatest accomplishment and comfort of their lives? It's the thing they can always lean on during a metaphysical crisis, or a moment of doubt about their relevancy - If I have done nothing else in this life, then at least I have raised my children well.

But what if, either by choice or by reluctant necessity, you end up not participating in this comforting cycle of family and continuity? What if you step out? Where do you sit at the reunion? How do you mark time's passage without the fear that you've just frittered away your time on earth without being relevant? You'll need to find another purpose, another measure by which to judge whether or not you have been a successful human being. I love children, but what if I don't have any? What kind of person does that make me?

Virginia Woolf wrote, "Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword." On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where "all is correct." But on the other side of that sword, if you're crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, "all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course." Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a far more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will also be more perilous.

I'm lucky that at least I have my writing. This is something people can understand. Ah, she left her marriage in order to preserve her art. That's sort of true, though not completely so. A lot of writers have families. Toni Morrison, just to name one example, didn't let the raising of her son stop her from winning a little trinket we call the Nobel Prize. But Toni Morrison made her own path, and I must take mine. The Bhagvad Gita - that ancient Indian Yogic text - says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection. So now I have starting living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.

Those last two lines especially resonate with me. Because, let's face it, I didn't expect to be where I am right now 10 or even 2 years ago - but here I am. The best I can do is live my own life as best I can, and be true to myself.