About every 6 months or so I find myself rewatching Eat, Pray, Love.
It’s a story that really speaks to me. It’s about a woman traveling physically, but also emotionally and spiritually, to find herself. To reinvent herself. To heal herself. I find that message incredibly inspiring and hopeful. So I watch it when I feel myself needing an extra injection of hope. The book is better, of course, but I am a slow reader and I need the injection to be quick and effective.
I recently watched it again.
This time of year is hard for me because the holidays are over, my birthday is over, and I am ready for winter to be OVER. Every spring, I feel myself reawaken with increased energy, hope, possibility. And I just can’t wait for the spring, so I suppose watching the movie was my way of trying to tide myself over.
One aspect of the storyline is comparing Americans to Europeans in certain ways. An Italian gentleman says that Americans know entertainment, but they don’t know pleasure. Then he explains an Italian concept he calls the pleasure of doing nothing. The main character then interprets this in her own way and makes a simple meal (boiled egg, asparagus, pasta, etc.) and eats it on the floor while reading the paper and wearing a lovely nighty. In my own attempt to stretch the power of this movie as far as it will go, I made my own pleasure of doing nothing meal. I rarely cook, so this was special and made me feel domestic and feminine.
At the risk of rambling, this movie also brings up a lot for me. They talk about weddings. Love. Faith. Travel. Life. Food. I suppose each one of those could be its own post.
Lately, I’ve felt a growing urge to create and write, but I have all these half-posts in my head. Today I sat down and just forced myself to start writing the first half in hopes that the second half would just manifest itself, as has happened in the past. And as you can read, that didn’t happen today. But I’m about to hit Publish because at this point I just want to put something out there.
Maybe this will get the juices flowing. Maybe I’ll write more about Eat, Pray, Love. Maybe spring will come early.
Psychobabble 
I saw Eat, Pray, Love for the first time not too long ago. While I’m not a woman trying to find myself, I did appreciate some of the philosophical ideas in the movie. I do kind of like the Zen way of writing. In the blogging world that’s the best part for me; reading people’s unfiltered thoughts and feelings, which is just what you did. It was a very enjoyable read.
Thanks, that’s such a nice thing to say.