I bought this book at San Francisco airport on my way to Utah. When I started reading it, first 50 pages were not very convincing to spend time finishing this book but I am glad I did finish it. The book is an interesting tale of a woman who goes to Rome, India and Indonesia to find some peace after having gone through a rough divorce and a rough relationship/fling. After finishing this book, I somehow had a wish that everyone I know including myself should be forced to go on a similar travel. World will be a much better place.
Below are some of my favorite lines from Elizabeth’s travel stories:
1. Love change?
“The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough – but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository. Even in the Eternal City, says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation”
2. Your choice of compromises?
“All those that you want from your relationship, Liz? I have always wanted those things, too”. In that moment, it was as if my strong mother reached across the table, opened her fist and finally showed me the handful of bullet she’d had to bite over the decades in order to stay happily married to my father. My mother has made choices in her life, as we all must, and she is at peace with them. The benefits of her choices are massive. May be somethings were sacrificed, and my dad made his sacrifices, too – but who amongst us lives without sacrifices? And the question now for me is, What are my choices to be? What do I believe that I deserve in this life? where can I accept sacrifice, and where can I not?
3. Word of the street?
Every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most people who live there.
NYC – achieve
Vatican – power (not faith as you’d think)
Rome – sex
for San Francisco, I think it’s “Hippie” in a good way of course.
for India, it’s “Love”
What’s the word in your family/life?
4. You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not
The Yogis say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We’re miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears, flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don’t realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a Supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That Supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this line “You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not”
Yoga is the effort to experience one’s divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever. Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek a place of eternal presence.
The resting place of the mind is the heart. The only thing the mind hears all day is clanging bells and noise and argument, and all it wants is quietude. the only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the silence of the heart. That’s where you need to go.
5. “What have you done for me lately?” - Eddie Murphy in Raw
I met an old lady once, almost one hundred years old, and she told me, “There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through the history. How much do you love me? And who’s in charge?”
Everything else is somehow manageable. but these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief and suffering.
6. Way from hell to heaven
Even in one lifetime, it’s obvious how often we must repeat our same mistakes, banging our head against the same old addictions and compulsions, generating the same old miserable and often catastrophic consequences, until was can finally stop and fix it. This is the supreme lesson of karma (and also of western psychology, by the way) – take care of the problem now, or else you’ll just have to suffer again later when you screw everything up next time. And that repetition of suffering – that’s hell. Moving out of that endless repetition to a new level of understanding – there’s where you’ll find heaven.
