My life as told by Elizabeth Gilbert

Tonight, after watching the movie Eat, Pray, Love for the second time with my FIREstarters girls, I referred back to a Facebook note I wrote a while back about the quotes from that movie that really related to my life. Then, seeing the new way it impacted me this evening, I added some more quotes to sum up my life at this point. And, still, I believe that I have been channeling Elizabeth Gilbert's writing through my entire life's journey - not the exotic, Rome/India/Bali-exploring parts, but the philosophical at the very least. So here are a few of the quotes:            

"I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism."

"Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it."

"Only the young and stupid are confident about sex and romance."

"Real, sane, mature love - the kind that pays the mortgage year after year and picks up the kids after school - is not based on infatuation but on affection and respect."

"I'm choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I'm making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises."

"Faith is a way of saying 'Yes, I preaccept the terms of the universe and I embrace in advance what I am presently incapable of understanding.'"
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"Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation."

"If I love you, I will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every definition of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will protect upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself and I will buy Christmas presents for your entire family. I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check. I will give you all this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else.

"It's still two human beings trying to get along, so it's going to be complicated. And love is always complicated. But humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something."

"Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing..." 

Oh, look, coffee. How perfect! <3