This is one of the books that I am currently reading for my book club. When I first started it I was having a very hard time getting into it, it just seemed to drag along and was not really capturing my interest. But I told myself that I should just keep reading so at least I would have something to talk about at our next meeting.
This morning I decided to sit down and read a little more while Max is taking his mid-morning nap and I have decided that I LOVE this book. Here is the synopsis of the book:
"In her early thirties, Elizabeth Gilbert had everything a modern American woman was supposed to want - husband, country home, successful career - but instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she felt consumed by panic and confusion. This wise and rapturous book is the story of how she left behind all these outward marks of success, and of what she found in their place. Following a divorce and a crushing depression, Gilbert set out to examine three different aspects of her nature, set against the backdrop of three different cultures: pleasures in Italy, devotion in India, and in the Indonesian island of Bali, a balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence."
The book is split into three different sections, her trip to Italy, India, and finally Indonesia. I am to the India part and in reading it have found out a few things about myself. During her trip to India and in trying to learn meditation she realizes that she is very much a controlling person and how hard it is for her to just let life go and accept it. Below is an excerpt that I love;
I have searched frantically for contentment for so many years in so many ways, and all of these acquisitions and accomplishments - they run you down in the end. Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time - when pursued like a bandit - will behave like one; always remaining one county or one room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping out the back door of the motel just as you're banging through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only a burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you. At some point you have to stop because it won't. You have to admit that you can't catch it. That you're not supposed to catch it. At some point, you gotta let go and sit still and allow contentment to come to you.
That is exactly how I feel. I always feel like I have to control all the things around me. In having Max I really have learned this about myself. I constantly find myself saying that I don't understand why he does or doesn't do things, I want to control everything about his life....but I can't. I think that I have become this way because I had a lot of things happen to me as a child that I couldn't control, I love my mother so much (especially now that I have a child of my own) and I don't blame her for what I went through as a child. She had three lives to worry about including her own and I know that it could not have been easy for her - I am barely making it by with just one and I have a husband who is always there for me. She was not that lucky.
I have to let the control issue not control me. That is so very hard for me to say and I think that it's going to be even harder to do. Practice what you preach....
I want to be able to do this for my son. I don't want him to grow up thinking that he has to control every single thing about his life. I want him to enjoy it...not spend every waking moment worried about what might or might not happen because it's out of his control. I can hear him in his swing right now cooing and babbling and I am tearing up just thinking about his sweet face and I just hope that I can love him enough to teach him about life....the right way!
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