Eat Pray Love and Oprah
By Lynn Rasmussen in Happiness/Mental health, Personal Evolution/Life Transition | Comments (1)
In the book Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth is nuts, crying on the bathroom floor for months, leaves her husband–the suburbs and babies just weren’t going to work for her–falls in and out of love on the rebound and then takes off (with a big fat book advance) for a year-long trip to find herself in Italy, India, and Indonesia.
Oprah is fascinated by this woman and the book. Oprah has said over and over again how very important it is to retain your sense of self. And this book is about the complete loss and then discovery of a renewed sense of self.
Oprah thinks that the self is something that you have that needs to be protected. And with a beautiful self like Oprah’s, no wonder! But the self is an illusion. We are creating ourselves as we live. You’re adding, strengthening or pruning neurons as you read this. Put in enough information–and who in this culture isn’t?–and soon you’ll find that the old you is no longer able to efficiently process what’s coming at you. You’ll find that for a while everything’s all wrong because your brain is literally reorganizing. For a while, all is chaos.
Like I say in Men Are Easy:
At some point you will probably find that the life you constructed no longer works. Maybe you can no longer tolerate what you tolerated before. Maybe he’s not changing and you are. Or he’s changing and demanding that you adapt.
In these times, your relationship to love and to others is undergoing intense growth, and transition, in nature and in life, is rarely smooth.
A time of intense growth is not like the bloom of a flower. It can be more like Mount St. Helens, rumbling and growing in pressure until it erupts, obscuring everything known. Eventually life comes back, often more beautiful than before, but the landscape is never the same again.
This is not the territory for sissies.
Our culture tends to think that chaos is breakdown, but, in nature, chaos is the re-ordering to a higher level of efficiency and complexity. Fear makes it all much more difficult to handle. When you’re afraid that you’re crazy and that you are having a breakdown, your brain can’t function properly. The brain fails to process as well.
But when you understand that the chaos is a good thing, that it’s temporary, and that it will result in a higher level of functioning, then you can relax and get curious about it. Once you understand that you’re changing your relationship to all of your relationships, then you can just wait and let it all shake out.
Too bad we all can’t just run off to Italy, India, and Indonesia. But we can all eat, pray, love, and talk and laugh with our friends. I’m just glad that I’ve been able to go through the craziness in relative obscurity. If Oprah’s going to go through it, it will be in a spotlight while running an empire. Geez.
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Since you brought up chaos ….
Most people like stability, which is related to equilibrium. But the laws of nature include entropy, meaning that the world naturally moves from states of order to states of disorder. The ultimate chaotic state is chaos.
It takes energy to keep things in order. We normally think of this as maintenance. At a certain point, though, the amount of energy required for maintenance gets too expensive, and we (sometimes) move on to something else. This could be an old car where the part to replaced has gone into short supply. It could also be the point at which we reach middle age, and give up on cosmetics that make us look young.
We’ve heard the expression of “bottoming out”. If we think about total chaos as most disordered state, then I think that we rarely get that far. Most people don’t keep their old cars until they have to be towed away. It’s all about how much disorder we can each personally stand, before we feel that we need to move on.