Eat Pray Love

Last night I watched Julia Robert's "Eat Pray Love" based on true-life author Elizabeth Gilbert.

Straight up, I want to say I disagree with the whole notion of dropping your life, taking a one-year sabbatical to go find yourself, find meaning in your life. I was condemnatory when I read the blurb and saw the trailer to the movie. I was verbally and vocally critical during the early part of the movie especially during the scene with the divorce lawyer and her soon-to-be ex-husband where he said: "I took a vow...it was till death do us part."

I thought her silly, immature and one confused woman approaching mid-life crisis and still behaving like a little girl. Irresponsible, selfish, undisciplined - oh the list goes on. I harshly termed her wanderlust "ichi-bawah".

It wasn't until the part in the movie where she vocalized her remorse, where she condemned herself for her actions that I relented and reminded myself that if one doesn't know the Creator and Source of Life, one is apt to run in circles searching for enlightenment. I start to empathise with Liz and appreciate that what she did, uprooting herself, discarding the habitual for the strange took a lot of courage and spunk.

Nevertheless I still think the movie another of those misleading stories for the female tribe. Like Cinderella; we grow up expecting persecution from other females and then waiting for Prince Charming to whisk us away to a fairytale life. Married life definitely isn't a fairytale; I see it like a 10,000-pc jigsaw puzzle - to be worked at. This movie might fertilize some seeds of discontent in the married woman's mind about just upping and going and maybe you'd find a better-looking someone at the end of your travels. Who's to say that after another 8 years she might need to wander again to find another love?

I'm not even speaking from the dubious wisdom of advanced years or the cruel unself-conscious idealism of the young who consider themselves invincible and invulnerable. I'm not even the mythical happily-married career woman, wife and mother - that despicable superwoman sitting in judgement of Liz's choice to live a life different from mine. Nor am I that little housewife with babe in arms looking on in silent envy like the one the song "I've Neer Been To Me" was addressing, wishing for a different life, a glamorous life with kings and princes, travelling the world instead of tied down with apron strings to suburbia.

I think myself quite close to being her peer,  maybe plus some 6 - 8 years. I have a career, I am married, again another 6 years longer than her. My work takes me places, I may not travel as much as her but I have travelled a little bit more than many of my own peers. Like her, I do not have children although there we differ because while she waited to see if she wanted to have a baby, I wanted many or at least one (one is better than none) but I don't have any. In the foregoing line, you could read that I was absolutely miserable about that status, especially 5 - 6 years ago as I approached my so-called feminine midlife angst.

I write this to underline that I do not have that happily ever after married life but I do have a happy marriage. I made it a point to put in a few pieces of that 10,000-pc jigsaw puzzle everyday or if I can't, I at least picked up the pieces, turned it round and round while looking for an appropriate spot to put it in. It's not that I'm more disciplined or have more perseverance.

My family, my friends and even my husband will vouch for my not finishing many things I start. Or as a kind friend put it: Heidi has seasons, a season to read and nothing else, a season to watch movies and nothing else, a season to wrtie and nothing else, a season to knit and nothing else, a season to FB and nothing else, a season to be best friends and a season to be silent...

Maybe because I lack perseverance in many things, I am unwilling to let my marriage fail for lack of working at it. Sure, you could say I am grounded and am myself unwavering in the very principle of "till death do us part". I also fervently believe that unhappiness or misery is just a matter of opinion. It's just a state of mind. The energy you give to being unhappy, or the brain cells you dedicate to thinking how miserable you are, you might as well give to thinking how to be happy, how to find things to laugh at. I don't know but that's what I do.

Or maybe, quite simply put, I still like the 10,000-pc jigsaw puzzle I bought 14 years ago so I still play with it.