Eat, Pray, Love: Indonesia

(I probably should postpone my last Eat, Pray, Love post until mid-February as my book club has decided to swap our original February selection for this book and now all of my favorite quotes and ideas are already advertised, but oh well. Indonesia is more quotes I love and don't have commentary on anyway.)

Page 260

...people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. 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. If you don't, you will leak away your innate contentment.

I love this idea. Happiness is absolutely a right for everyone, but that doesn't mean that everyone gets it. Not everyone chooses to be happy. Not everyone puts in the effort necessary to find their own happiness or maintain it. How sad but also revolutionary.

All the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people.

This is even worse! Just as sneezes and yawns and hiccups are contagious, our attitudes are, too. When you are around a person who complains a lot, sometimes the tendency is to compete for the spotlight. "You think that's bad? Well I have a story about something that happened to me that's worse!" Girls do this a lot because we talk and compare and rate just about everything. "Oh, your boyfriend is being a jackass? Well let me tell you about this guy I dated who was more of a jackass than your jackass!" We constantly reinforce the mood around us. Attitude is our own fault. We choose to enjoy our lives or complain about them. (This is even more reinforced by things like Facebook that ask people to post their "status" on a weekly, daily or sometimes hourly basis. I find that I look forward to reading what my positive friends have to say, whether it be about how much they enjoy their jobs, the funny things their kids have done, or some random positive thing they found about their day. On the other hand, it becomes wearisome to constantly read updates from friends who use their Facebook to status to complain about everything from the weather to the traffic.)

Page 262

The karmic philosophy appeals to me on a metaphorical level because even in one lifetime it's obvious how often we must repeat our same mistakes, banging our heads against the same old addictions and compulsions, generating the same old miserable and often catastrophic consequences, until we 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 problems now, of else you'll just have to suffer again later when you screw everything up the 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.

Page 325

The Yogic sages say that all the pain of human life is caused by words, as is all the joy.

As a teacher of language who spends abundant time literally jumping up and down trying to convince 15 year-olds that words are important, ALL words are important, I am in love with this quote. I will most likely make my next poor class do a journal on it. What a profound idea. Maybe I'll even turn it into a placard in my classroom or a pillow in my house. Ugh. LOVE it!