Eat, Pray, Love

Eat, Pray, Love: a fantastic memoir about one woman's experience eating her way through Italy, learning how to pray in India, and letting herself fall in love again in Bali over the course of a year. I like that it has no clear plot line. Rather, it's like life itself: unpredictable, messy sometimes, and not every event ties neatly into a "moral of the story". While I would love to be able to travel like that (how did she have the money to travel anyways when her husband got everything in the divorce?) the message I got was the opposite: I can go on the same journey without leaving home. It would be easier, sure, to leave school, home, family, and other distractions to go out and "discover" myself, but I can't. And really, our true selves are in our everyday lives 2/3 of the year. Weekends and vacations make up the other 1/3. What is realer than us in our real lives? I am the kind of person that gets inspired during a vacation to do something and then I get sucked back into my everyday life and lose that quality which I wanted to keep. I am resolving not to do that this next year. I am on a journey to find out who I really am and improve the parts I need to, amidst my everyday life. My goal is to not get distracted by my daily life. This is probably a lifelong process, but that is ok with me. I have already come farther the past 3 months than I have my whole life. And while I am worried about going back to school and losing myself, I am comforted by the fact that I have a solid foundation in these past three months and as soon as I have realized I have lost my way, I will reel myself back in and create balance in my life again.