When the book Eat Pray Love was released I was gifted the book by multiple people. Elizabeth Gilbert is now a celebrated author and Ted Talk-er but was then a new author, taking the world by storm. A number of people saw me in the book, maybe they saw that adventure was something I needed in my life. Maybe they saw that I was a gypsy soul in a business-person’s body. Maybe they saw the writer in me.
At the time, I was mildly offended. The story really didn’t resonate with me. Her writing didn’t resonate with me. I didn’t get the connection that others were so clearly seeing.
They were right. I was wrong. Almost a year to the day after it was published I had my own Eat Pray Love. She went around the world to find love; I went to Boulder, Colorado. Mark and I will celebrate 12 years of love, friendship and marriage this year. Our story would be called “This Is Not What I Ordered”. Falling head over heels with a sculptor from Texas with two grown boys was not something I expected to be on the menu.
Eat Pray Love is a love story wrapped in adventure. Elizabeth Gilbert travels to Bali, India and Italy on a journey of discovery. It is an undeniably beautiful story of finding your way to thrive after your world falls apart. It’s a story about how she learnt to be ok and, without getting to corny, about learning to love herself. I think that’s what my friends were trying to tell me.
In this lesser known Ted Talk, Elizabeth Gilbert talks about another kind of love. She talks about your happy place, your home, that thing you do that grounds you and the place where success and failure don’t exist.
At the peak of her success with Eat Pray Love she felt like the old failing diner waitress of her past. The diner waitress that suffered rejection after rejection for six years solid. I have noticed the same curious thing about success; it doesn’t feel that successful. It can feel like pressure, burden and expectation. Success and failure, Gilbert notes, both catapult you out of your comfort zone - they are both disorienting.
She needed a refuge; not so much a place to hide but a place to find balance. A place that you love more than your ego. Perhaps a place where your ego is silenced. Gilbert calls it finding 'Home'.
Home is that thing you love most. For my husband it’s making art. For me it’s working in or with companies, despite my gypsy soul. Home is that place where the noises go away. Where the volume on your inner dialogue is turned down. Where the labour is more important than the fruits it might bare.
We work so hard for the success and we work even harder to avoid failure. What I think Elizabeth Gilbert cracks open in this brief seven minutes of insight is a way to just work hard for the sake of the work. “Do what you love and you will never work a day in your life” as the saying goes. Maybe it should be ”love what you do and you can never fail”?