What did I eat today? I'll tell you what I ate today.
Strawberries from Costco. These babies are a sure sign that summer is coming. Bite into a big, juicy strawberry and all your cares will go away. Mmmmm.... I think I'm going to eat some more now.
Side note: What are your thoughts on the movie Eat, Pray, Love? I watched it the other night and I've been trying to decide what I think about it over the last few days.
At first, I thought I loved it. There are so many lessons to be learned from it, about forgiveness, life, and finding joy in the journey. Here are a couple of my favorite quotes from IMDB.
"Maybe my life hasn't been so chaotic. It's just the world that is and the only real trap is getting attached to any of it. Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation."
This one especially, which I think was the underlying message of the whole movie:
"In the end, I've come to believe in something I call "The Physics of the Quest." A force in nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity. The rule of Quest Physics goes something like this: If you're brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting, which can be anything from your house to bitter, old resentments, and set out on a truth-seeking journey, either externally or internally, and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher and if you are prepared, most of all, to face and forgive some very difficult realities about yourself, then the truth will not be withheld from you."
The thing that really bothers me about the whole movie is how she ended up on this journey of self-discovery in the first place. One of the first scenes in the movie is Julia Roberts' character wandering around her house, thinking about the life she has built for herself, her house, her career, her husband, and wondering how she is so unhappy with something she takes full responsibility for creating. After a few moments in the movie of a whispered prayer, begging The Lord to tell her what to do, Liz Gilbert gets back in bed with her husband and says,
"I don't want to be married anymore."
Wait, what? You've built a life with a person for x amount of years and when you find yourself in a place of uncertainty and self doubt, your first thought is to scrap everything and start over without a second thought to maybe expressing your concerns to your husband and trying to work things out? And we as the audience are just supposed to be okay with that? Keep in mind that this unhappiness really had nothing to do with her husband. He was a man who couldn't make up his mind about a career, yes, but he was really depicted as a good guy. Obviously, I've never been divorced and I'm in a pretty dang good spot in my marriage, so my view is probably slightly skewed, but there is something terribly unsettling to me about that. I've gained a very different perspective about marriage in the past nine months and I've come to regard it as something very special, sacred even. The fact that a decision of this magnitude was regarded so lightly to her (at least it was depicted that way in my opinion) was really sad to me.
I learned in my human development class that a healthy person continuously goes through what is called the MAMA cycle. It's an acronym that refers to periods of
Moratorium and
Achievement. A moratorium period is a period of self-reflection, or a period where you don't necessarily have it all planned out. Achievement is when things start to come together and you set out on a given path. When you come to a fork in the road, you enter another moratorium period, so on and so forth throughout your life.
So while Liz is in this moratorium period, don't you think the person who has vowed to be her companion for the rest of her life might have a little more insight? He probably can sense that she's unhappy. Why let him help her get to the root of the problem instead of kicking his butt to the curb, breaking his heart and then having that guilt to get rid of later on?
I'm not saying that divorce is never warranted, but it's a sad commentary on society when a situation like this is considered normal or even praised. I'm the minority when I say I'm willing to weather the storms as they come with my husband and that is a tragic fact.
You don't need a year, two boyfriends, three countries, a new language and a pair of fat jeans to find yourself.
