Just a year ago I received a gift (from life) called Julie & Julia, a movie full of personal meaning and mainly a reminder of how fortunate I’ve been to have journeys in my life. This summer, life conspired again to give me another gift, this time named: Eat Pray Love. Even when I got the book almost two years ago, I never connected and couldn’t finish it. Probably, it wasn’t my time to read it but after watching Julia Robert’s movie I felt the same way I did a year ago after enjoying the delicious story of the Julias: full of life and dreams!This is a movie about finding love but most importantly rediscovering yourself, something that could be a little bit more challenging than everyone would think. For Liz (Julia Roberts) it took a year of traveling through Italy, India and Indonesia to connect with her soul and to find her new path. Like I wrote a year ago on the Julie & Julia post, for me everything started 8 years ago when I moved to Canada. At first it was my adventure in Montreal, having a French or more precisely a Quebecois lifestyle where I learnt to really live and enjoy the present and savour the smallest details in life. A year later when I moved to Toronto, I was faced with a world in which life goes faster than other places and where time is money. A place where I really needed to know my direction in order to succeed. Here, I started one of the most important battles of my life: letting go who I was in the past, defining who I really was and daring to be who I wanted to be. Eight years after, even when I think I have a pretty accurate idea of my path in life, I’m still reinventing myself every single day.
Eat Pray Love reminds us that life is a constant evolution, that we have to learn to forgive us in order to be free and then happy. We have to embrace life in our own personal way. There are no other formulas but ours. Every person we meet in life is someone that is there to teach us something about ourselves and just like Ketut, the medicine man, said: “We have to smile not only with our face but with our heart, mind and even with our liver”. That’s the only way to survive in a world where sometimes it seems like there is no time to be present and to have happy feelings and thoughts.
One dialogue that I loved is when Richard from Texas tells Liz that we have to learn how to select our thoughts just the same way we select the clothes we are going to wear every day. He says that we constantly have the need to control our life but that we should be better working on controlling our mind, a power we can cultivate. He also says to not invest energy in bad thoughts or feelings and that whenever they come to our mind we should send them light, love an let them go. Then focus on what really matters: US.
I can just say that we have to have an appetite for our life, to marvel at something and that sometimes we have to lose our balance as we know it in order to find it all over again. If you can’t read the book (yes I’m finally reading it!) I suggest that you watch the movie. It’s pretty close to the story and just as inspiring. Thank you life for thinking of me again and sending me such a nice gift! I can’t wait to continue my journey in life, to keep learning, growing, eating good gelati and of course writing! And just like Ketut would say: “See you later alligator!”Dedicated to all the wonderful women in the world that are in a personal journey to rediscover themselves. Let yourself GO!
