Interview with Author Elizabeth Gilbert on Engaging with Creativity | Audible

hi I'm Elizabeth Gilbert I am the author and the narrator of Eat Pray Love and big magic big magic is is my term for the thing that happens to you when you are making a thing so the essence of creativity is that creativity is the relationship between human beings efforts and the mysteries of inspiration right so you take your efforts and you enter into this very bizarre otherworldly often collaboration with the mysteries of inspiration with some strange force that's calling you to try to make this thing for me the most interesting part of that entire engagement is not necessarily the thing that you end up making it's what making that thing does to you internally and what that is is big magic because it unfolds aspects of yourself that you never knew you had it causes you to walk on the edge of the cliff of daring at the edge of your capacities it reveals things that can sometimes be very painful it makes you feel sort of communion to everyone who came before you it does very interesting work on you while you're making that work and that's the essence of why I feel like I want to get more and more people permission to engage with their creativity because they'll have the possibility of bumping up against big magic in the process regardless of whether what they make is good you know viable whether they make a living for it that's that's that's all secondary the important thing is what the thing does to you so what inspiration feels like the clue is a little bit in the word itself which comes to us from the Greek or the Latin some ancient language I think it's Latin to inhale to imbibe to bring in to inspire my supposed to xfire to stop breathing so to inspire you know is exactly what it feels like because anybody who's ever had an idea regardless of what that idea is whether it's an artistic idea or a spiritual or emotional idea or a political idea or some sort of adventure that they want to take it does feel like something has come into you from outside of you and even people who are really empirical rational scientific thinkers will say and then this idea came to me I always say it that way right um well from where right but they know you know they would know this deeply in our human bones right and this is how all of humans for all time have discussed the sensation of inspiration and then it brings these common symptoms you know the the chills up the back of your neck the bumps on your arm the upset stomach of nervousness and excitement that's same feeling you get when you're standing over a cliff looking into a precipice where you sort of want to jump at you're terrified you know the distraction that's similar to falling in love the obsession the waking up at four o'clock in the morning and you're still thinking about this thing you can't shake it and it does feel like you're being inhabited by some idea and in fact I would say that you are and what that idea is doing as it's sending you all these signals and clues is that it's asking you a question and the question that it's asking you is do you want to do this with me are we going to do this like do you want to do this do you want to do this do you want to do this and most of our lives we say no it's all too much trouble a little busy I've got house guests but if you say yes you then enter into a contract with this very mysterious force and that I think is one of the most interesting things a person I would disagree i don't think it's sometimes scary when you look over the precipice into the risk of inspiration and creativity it is always scary it is always scary and I think you have to just be really honest and kind of wise about recognizing that that is not a bug that's a feature right it's not a it's not a freakish accident that you're feeling nervousness that is how it is that is how it always is and that is how it should be because your creativity in your fear I always define them as being like conjoined twins they're always going to be together because your creativity asks you again and again and again to enter into realms of uncertain outcome and your fear is genetically programmed to forbid you from doing that all your fear wants you to do is never enter into a realm of uncertain outcome because all it knows is that it has to go for the worst-case scenario which means any uncertain how come ends on your death and that's literally what it feels like you know the great artist and cartoonists Lynda Barry has this fantastic way of describing this because she teaches people who are not artists how to make art and she said that first moment in the room when you're working with a bunch of adults who stopped drawing when they were children and normally they stopped drawing at a very particular specific moment when someone made fun of them or they suddenly realized they were good enough like this is a lot of us have art scars right and so she deals with people like that so they're professionals and the last time they drew something was when they were nine and she puts paper and crams in front of them and she says something like okay we're gonna draw a race car now are you going to draw Batman she always has them draw things that probably were the last thing they drew a snowman she said the tension and the electricity in that room when a bunch of people who have not made a little piece of art since they were nine years old re-engaged she said it feels like the room is going to catch on fire there's so much fear there's so much energy there's so much excitement because your fears like if I draw a picture of us no man I'm gonna die I might die I might do it wrong and it might kill me that's truly what it feels like it's bizarre and so for me my whole life of creativity has not been about becoming fearless it's because I'm not interested in being fearless I've met for those people I think they're sociopaths I'm interested in becoming brave and there's a big difference there and to be fearless means you don't even know what fear is which means you're missing a huge part of what it is to be human being to be brave means that you keep going anyway and with the gentle empathy and the recognition that probably no one will die from this even though it feels like that and you can say to yourself I know it feels like this is you know the end of your life but we're just trying to write a poem it's going to be all right no one's no one's going to get hurt here no animals were injured in the making of this poem so it's about more walking hand in hand with your fear and making space for it rather than trying to drive it out Oh pitiful pearl you know I actually just found out that pitiful pearl was an actual character in 1920s silent films and she's the one who's always being tied to the railroad tracks and going my dad used to call me pitiful pearl when I was a child sweet family nickname because I was an incredibly fearful and anxious and nervous kid prone to very dramatic meltdowns at any new experience and it was kind of a family joke for a really long time and I defended my fear for a lot of years I mean I really tried to make everyone feel it and make everyone know that I said in the book I spend a lot of my life trying to convince my parents that I was absolutely hopeless but they were like no you're not like they just weren't buying it for a minute and something happened to me in the middle of adolescence where I just had this realization that this is a weird battle to be having to spend your life defending your fears there's a lovely line that says make an argument for your limitations and you get to keep them right and I've been arguing really hard for my limitations and there is a point there is a place in the world for sort of recognizing your vulnerabilities and recognizing your weaknesses and then there's a place for like okay but yeah enough right enough because what I realized was that my fears were keeping my life very boring and I didn't want to have a boring life and it's not that they were evil or dark it's just that your fear always asks you to do the same thing which is nothing just nothing like that's that all choices you've got this road and there's your curiosity and everything that leads to on this side and you've got your fear in your fears like no and whenever I come to my fear even now and I asked my fear and I say listen I'm listening to you and I know that you don't want me to do this can you offer me a more interesting alternative to this thing that I want to try or this thing that I want to do just I'd be happy to listen to your your suggestions and it's like no have any just no no just don't not that but I can't offer you anything else and and that's why a fear-based life becomes a very small life and a very small life becomes a very bored and boring life and I just feel like it's too interesting a world and it's too interesting a situation to be a human being and to interesting and opportunity to be a human being to just let that constantly be driving it's not even a question of whether it's loud it's just you can't get rid of it it's going to be there but it doesn't get to drive if it doesn't get to hold the map it doesn't get to choose the snacks it doesn't get to ever suggest detours my friend the great performance artist Sarah Jones has a wonderful way of saying this that she said when she's on a creative project she feels as if it's this highway and the minute she starts asking herself questions at the beginning of the project like is this viable can I actually pull this off what will people think of this can my agents sell this is this what the audiences are looking for right now any of those questions are these these exit ramps off this highway that she very dearly needs to stay on and if she takes these exit ramps into any of those fear-based questions she's going to end up as she puts it in a very bad neighborhood where people are going to steal her hubcaps off her car and beat her up and leave her for dead and that would be the end of her creative project so the thing is the focus of okay yeah that that's scary that exit ramp is scary that and yet we have this thing we need to do and so we're just going to keep driving down that highway originally I had called it creative living without fear but that's not at all what I'm getting at because beyond fear includes fear Without Fear denies fear right so it's like okay we're favored afraid we're going to do this anyway so I'm constantly trying to be like no it's not without because i don't like perpetuating the myth that you can get rid of your fear rather than learning how to make reluctant friends with it but as far what is what is the creative life a creative life in my definition is any life where you consistently and routinely and habitually make your decisions based on curiosity rather than fear that's it and that can end up looking like anything so it's not so much about what you end up making or what you end up doing that for me defines whether a person is living a creative life it's about a way of being in the world a spirit of living in the world that just looks at that again that division in the road between curiosity and fear and again and again not just once not just twice not just at some particular key moment but habitually allows yourself to go down the curiosity path if you do that again and again and again you'll end up creating a life that is different than anybody else's life and that is a reflection of the particularity that is you right the experiment of the universe that has never been tried before which is you and you will end up co-creating your life and then you yourself become the work of art right so that it's not so important what the results of this is it's again this process of constantly being in the state of becoming constantly being the state of unfolding constantly saying yes constantly bothering to turn your head a quarter of an inch to look a little bit closer at something that caught your attention and using that as a scavenger hunt to negotiate the weird experiment that is your life more like a mouse but really truly because it's like curiosities so small so much at the time and I think a lot of the times that people the problem where people don't live a curiosity driven life is that they don't trust such tiny Clues they're waiting for lightning in the bottle there waiting for the sign from god they're waiting for Moses to come down from mountain and hand them a tablet and say you know this is your moment they're waiting for something very grandiose when in fact it's this trail of breadcrumbs this almost invisible trail of breadcrumbs that's what a curiosity driven life is and to say even though this clue doesn't add up to anything I've ever done before it doesn't make sense may never turn into anything is almost doesn't even have a pulse I'm going to follow it and the next and the next on the next it's a tap on the shoulder it's not a double rainbow with a unicorn running through it right it's just a little tap on the shoulder this this is I think the contradiction that we have to figure out how to make enough space to hold in our lives if we want to have creative lives and if we want to have sane creative lives which I think it is important important to strive for the most wise people who I've ever met are the people who are capable of holding two completely contradictory ideas to be true at the same time right and they don't their heads don't explode from that and so they're able to for instance look at their families and say these people mean everything in the world to me this is my tribe these are the people that come from I would give them all a kidney if I needed to and these are the most ridiculous obnoxious horrible people in the world who keep me trapped and I have you know are to blame for all my psychosis you know and both of those things are true at the same time and holding that contradiction between those truths is what makes you be able to remain kind of a piece in a world where we're constantly being asked to alter those contradictions so in the artistic or the creative world the contradiction that I think you have to be able to imbibe if you want to be saying is what I am creating right now is the most important thing in the entire world and it doesn't matter at all and you have to constantly be standing in the middle of the tension between those two contradictory ideas if you don't think that what you're trying to make is the most important thing in the world then there's no reason to bother trying to make it because it's so hard to do and until you need needs to matter you know and when you're working on editing that sentence or trying to you know master that dance step or trying to learn how to sing that song or trying to whatever the thing is that you're making you have to believe that there's a point otherwise you will very quickly quit and be like it you know it doesn't matter but then once you've made it you have to release it into this other realm of it's not that big a deal it's just the thing that I made it's not the Christ child right and what else that often happens is that when you when you care so much about something when you're making it you carry that care onward into how much you care about what people think of it how much money it makes how many units it sells what the critics say and when you when you ship that care into their you're signing up for a world of hurt because you're not in control of what's going to happen to it next so it's like love it release it love it release it and sometimes you have to go back and forth in five minutes between that you know so when I'm writing I have to address every sentence as if the future of Nations depends on getting this thing right and then I have to be ready to delete that and throw it into the garbage and never look at it again five minutes later if it didn't work and then go back to this matters it doesn't matter and it feels like that should make you crazy but actually it makes you sane because you know how batteries work that there are polarity between positive and negative lip like this that's how the battery works and then that's how an engine runs so that's the battery flippa JH that you need to be doing in your creativity if you stay too much on one side the battery's dead if you're like doesn't matter who cares if you're just a pathetic you'll never make anything or you've just committed to one of them or you're flipping between grandiosity and self-hatred which is of course two sides of the same coin in most cases where you're like I'm the greatest I'm the worst I'm the greatest I'm the worst hey you know what you're very likely not the greatest and you are totally certainly not the worst and there is an enormous amount of real estate between the greatest and the worst and you're somewhere in there and that's a good place to be and most of us with the exception of the one greatest whatever that even means Beyonce and the worst whatever that even means i don't even know today most of us are just in that huge field and and that's okay and I feel like so many people try to psyche themselves up to make things by purporting to be the greatest but it doesn't work because it's not true and there's a part of your soul that knows that now I'm probably actually really not the greatest so when you do like the eye of a tiger I'm the greatest thing there's a part of you that knows better than to believe it so for me the real strength comes from saying I don't know if I'm the greatest or the worst but I'm here and and while I'm here have the right to be here and I'm going to stand in the entitlement of being a person who has the right to collaborate with creativity and see what happens and it's all right and that's enough and get a lot of work done in that in that big field between the greatest of the worst yeah I always say if you're alive you're a creative person and I know there are people who will buck against that and you know the thing is here's the proof of this one you are participating in an ongoing story of creation that is happening right like you are something that is happening like there's a lovely one it can't now remember who said it might be jack Kornfield might be wronged us but it's like you know a wave is something that the ocean is doing a person is something that the universe is doing you know like life is something that the universe is doing so yours this thing that's happening that's in creation evidence of creation is around us at all times things are being born things are dying things are being made things are falling apart stars are exploding new galaxies are forming life is existing and then not like it's happening story the actions here it's happening right now in your part of it and I think we get stuck my friend Rob Bell always says we get stuck in a static state universe where we sort of think like nothing is happening here tomorrow is going to look exactly like today I am a fixed entity and all evidence points to that not being true and so creativity is just about acting in co-creation with something that's going on anyway you know like signing up to participate in a life that's it has meaning and and it has really interesting things I mean what could be more interesting than being a person where history has shown us that literally anything can happen to literally anybody at literally any moment but you know like that is the state that were and that is some pretty fascinating stuff so if you're alive you're your creative person because you're part of this whole story of creation and you come from tens of thousands of years of generations of human beings who are makers your ancestors in mind your grandparents are nine were people who made things with their hands who took the world and altered it for better for worse every inch of this earth has been altered by human making we are the making ape that is what we do we take something we look at it we don't like the way it is we change it that's creativity and so we our ancestors have that and then if you look at your children they're born doing this stuff in addictively they draw they sing they dance they play it's all in us and then somewhere along the line there comes this moment we're usually in school you get the message that actually jennifer is creative and and Joshua they're the creative ones in the last she's a good drawer and he can say they shunt them out into some special program for special kids and then the rest of everybody is told you're just here to be producers and consumers in to pay bills and time that's the message that you get well yeah I absolutely believe in talent and I think it's naive not to not to say that that's a thing and talent is comes for us from from Latin and your talent when you were in the army and which everyone was the Roman Empire was your salary it's your payment it's your it's your segment it's your piece of what you got right of the pie it's your split of the loot basically and it's something that would have been weighed you know so that everyone is given a certain allotment and I love this idea of because talent is something where there's a part of your consciousness that weighs the weight seems to be here right the weight seems to be in music the way it seems to be in science the weight seems to be in communication like there's some you have an extra couple coins that you were thrown that's really cool that's not enough and it's also only known to God or whatever how much you got paid so I don't know to this day what the exact allotment of my talent for writing is I do know that in my youth I met a lot of people who I thought and who seemed to be a great deal more talented than me naturally and I know that I cared about it more than they did and I worked harder than they did and I think that's extremely important so I invested my payment in the energy that was put into cultivating something there's a lot you can do with your little sack of silver right I mean it's yours to spend however you like so you can waste it on hookers and eight balls you can you know which is like a water really talented people at Hollywood to you can bury it because you're so afraid that someone will steal it you cannot trust that you ever have it so you won't even dare to spend a dime of it you can invest it in making it grow you can share it you can give it away there's so much stuff you can do with this thing so it's not enough to just say you have it or you don't have it and I also love this idea some people have it some people don't we don't know what I don't know what you have within you but I think the most interesting possible way to walk through the world is to assume that you have some pretty sting stuff within you and the great poet Jack Gilbert who I quote often in the book big magic my favorite line something that he said to a young woman who said that she wanted to be a writer and he said do you have the courage and it's such a beautiful moment he said you have the courage to bring forth the work that you've got with the new he said the treasure that is buried within you is hoping you will say yes that is the most interesting thing and I've had people say to me aren't you afraid that your book is going to encourage a bunch of talentless people to make a bunch of crappy art first of all like the person who asked me that I sort of had this moment of looking at them like you and I come from such different planets I don't even know where to begin answering this but the short answer is no I'm not concerned about that my fear and anxiety I'm interested in your fear and anxiety that you're concerned about people making crappy art what that has to do with your life I don't even know why that's even something that's keep you up at night but my concern is not that the world is filled with crappy art my concern is that the world is filled with millions and millions of people who are not making anything and it is in our nature to be makers who are just being told that they're here to produce and consume in the COG of the machine that's not enough for human beings so no go make your crappy art because it might not be good whatever that even means whoever gets to determine that but something will happen to you and the making of that that will be very worth doing well I can talk about inspiration two ways I can talk about inspiration in a way that will make empirical people not get hives and the way that I talk about it then is to say it feels like right we like lean on metaphor inspiration feels like it's coming from some external force it feels like a sort of a haunting or and imbibing from some spirit from another world it makes you feel like your hand is being guided by the divine and whenever you can use metaphoric language around people who are really uncomfortable with mystery but they relax right so of course when I give my TED talk I speak that way um Entre Nous I totally believe this is real right and I have to operate from this place that it's real I had a conversation recently on NPR where this woman who's so lovely this interviewer who so truly obviously wants to take me seriously was trying to give me an out and say it's almost like you believe in magic the way that you talk about it and I'm like no I totally believe in magic and not only that so did everyone until about two hundred years ago until the world kind of got boring with scientific reason and rational thought and empiricism and look we're all great beneficiaries of scientific thought and rationalism and empiricism it caused the end of the end of kings it started the end of racism it allowed women to have a voice in society it gave us an iphone look we love it but it's not enough it's not enough and you have to keep some part of your spirit or your solar whatever you want to call it you can even just call it your mind open to the fact that there is a great deal going on here that is very weird and the creative part of your mind must be preserved from a life of pure rational thought or it will never be able to make anything interesting at all you know hyper hyper and Pierce isn't isn't enough on again my friend Rob Bell has a wonderful thing about this where he says it's all well and good to say yeah nothing going on here we're all just DNA it's all just you know very explained and then you hold your first child on the day that they're born or you stand over the grave of someone it's not enough you know then why do I feel like this you know why why are we so different from every other species on earth we don't need to be able to write operas why do we do this you know creativity itself is at its essence a terribly irrational behavior you know if you look at it just from a biological standpoint what you're doing when you're engaging in pure creativity is you're saying to the University of the world to yourself I'm going to take the most precious resource I have which is my time my life my energy that could be used doing very reasonable things finding food finding shelter finding a mate in enhancing my wealth creating a position in the world and I'm going to use that time to make something that nobody needs and maybe nobody wants and maybe won't be any good and maybe I won't even like and that's what I'm going to do now for a few years and that is weird like no other animal who do that there's so much other stuff you could be doing besides that so why and the answer is I don't know I just know that there's a thing that wants us to work with it in co-creating the world and I'm happy to sign up and say yes and be part of that story your soul has to hear you say it it's not real until it's been given a voice I really do feel like it's not enough to write it down but that still is a whisper right writing is a kind of whispered voice even though it can be very strong whisper right you're you have to over hear yourself say these words and I think we've all had experiences in our lives where something comes out of our mouth before we have even thought it through sometimes that's a disaster sometimes it's an epiphany where you didn't even know you wanted that until you heard your voice say it you didn't even know that that marriage was done until you suddenly out of nowhere said the words this isn't working anymore right you didn't even know how much you hated that job until one night you hear yourself saying I literally cannot go another day at this place like you didn't there's things that just have to be spoken and then once they're spoken there's a great deal of power the beginning was the word right sir creation begins there's a great deal of power in that statement because it's sort of echoes and reverberates and it exists in the world now and it challenges you and then there's also the case of whether you want to say it so that other people hear it I know there's this big school of thought that says that you should never talk about a creative project while you're working on it because you're less likely to do the work if you speak about it I think there's even a TED talk about this that has some very good sociological data to back up that there's a part of your brain that can't tell the difference between you talking about doing a thing and doing a thing so if you're talking about doing it you're not doing it and I I get that and I'm certain whoever did that research is accurate it doesn't happen to apply to my life for me there is sort of throwing the flag down the field and then you've thrown it and then you gotta go catch up with it when you say you're going to do something and so for me it's important that I constantly tell people I'm working on a novel right now um it's due next year it's about this and once you say it you're like I guess I'm I guess we're doing that you know cuz now I've said it I mean and that's why that's why it and it's also it's also about having a voice you know which a lot of women and minorities and oppressed people in the world's history had never had you've got a voice now so what are you gonna do we're gonna be say it say it and then be it do really interesting thing about reading an audible book your own is that the ear here is better than the ICS which is also why as I'm writing I'm usually often speaking I'm reading aloud what I'm writing because I can hear the musicality of whether the sentence is working better than I can see whether it's working so I you know my ear needs to hear that i use the word very six times on that page my i will skip over it but my ear will hear it alright so while you're in the studio reading this manuscript that you think has been edited and polished the amazing thing is the mistakes that you find and and the mistakes in tone in pacing in God the sentence would be better or this is a long and awkward statement that I'm even boring myself now i wish i had taken this page and chopped it down to a paragraph so there were moments when i was reading it where i would just like start laughing and be like who wrote this carpet yeah we have to do this differently and i wanted to you know like edit and change because telling something is very different from writing something and being in that audio sound booth my sense was this awareness of an audience of people who i was speaking to rather than an audience of readers who i'm writing to and that's a really different thing and I want that story to be more clear and more precise and even better so I feel like you should almost get to have a second pass at editing the book after you've read it on the audio book because you're going to hear mistakes and and imperfections that you can later fix then again how many times do I say we're not here to be perfect we're in process it's all good Eat Pray Love was more of an emotional experience to read aloud then big magic was because I was walking through years of the most painful part of my life and talking about the most intimate revelations of my life and remembering and reliving Andrey feeling and re seeing these epiphan ille transformational moments that happened and that travel like I really felt having read the audio book that I was back on that journey again for eat pray love big magic is different big magic is a manifesto right and I've never written something that comes from such a strong place of this is how it is right like there's almost this like this real firmness in it so the emotion that I was feeling was more an urgency of come on you guys like stop stop getting in your own way stop not doing the thing that you know that you're being invited to do comment like so I just felt this great passion while I was reading it which is of course an emotion but a different one from the sort of tearfulness and the vulnerability that I felt when I was my favorite audio book reader is Juliet Stevenson who reads all of the jane austen books and those are a great comfort to me and I love love love her voice she did a beautiful reading of Middlemarch by George Eliot which is one of my favorite books and so when the signature of all things came out and I don't read my novels in audio book because I'm not an actor and I feel like you really need an actor to read a novel because there's so many different voices and there's so many different tones I can read my own memoir because it's basically just my journal but a novel is a very different thing and and I just remember making a really strong petition saying there's only one person who I want doing this and it's gotta be Juliet Stevenson and I know she's British and I'm an American author but we're writing in the 19th century we don't know how 19th century Americans spoke it's probably much more like a British I made some case about it but really I just wanted to hear her magnificent voice voice take command of that story as she did let's start with exactly the same you know I really do feel like i can divide my life between before april oven after and i don't mean before the phenomenon of Eat Pray Love and after I mean before the journey of Eat Pray Love and after that was the most important thing I ever did in my life was that year and that time spent alone in reflection and contemplation and really getting as firm as I think it's possible to get when we're such shifting weird beings but a sort of sense of what I am and more importantly what I'm not you know and I think making peace with what you're not is a really important part of life and maturity and so the person who came out at the end of that journey is somebody who I made very good friends with on that trip which I hadn't been before I'd been a rival against myself which I think we often are like sort of in this battle against our multiple voices please don't make me explain that I know you all know I'm talking about you know none of us is really a self we're like this this auditorium full of selves on all sort of screaming at each other at the same time and often in conflict with each other and what I did on that journey was just one by one a peace accord with every single one of those different parts of myself like shake hands make friends we're stuck with each other forever let's have this be as peaceful neighborhood as it can be I'm never going to go after you anymore you're welcome to stay in the family it's all good like just this very generous spirit of we're all well welcome here and that has not changed and I think that that is why I don't walk around in fear of diving into another deep despairing depression again because i know that depression is anger turned inwards and it's usually anger against yourself turned against yourself and i just have a very strong commitment to non-violence against myself that extends i hope into a sense of non-violence against anybody else's you yeah I mean reading those essays was really revelatory for me because it helped me to be able to formulate in my own mind an answer to a question I have never been able to answer which is why did eat pray love do what it did I you know why why this book why this moment why did this phenomenon occur and what I saw in reading sa after sa after sa was that it seemed as though each reader who contributed to this anthology which is obviously a self-selecting group of people who were moved by the book they found some moment in the book that ignited a comprehension that they never really grasped before about their own lives which is your life does not have to keep looking like this and whatever this is depends on the person in their circumstances so this could be toxic marriage this could be addiction this could be you know terrible life defeating job this could be substance abuse you know self-hatred some sort of some sort of violence against the self that you've accepted as just well that's just how it is and it's how it's always going to be and I made my bed nice gotta sleep in it I said I was going to marry his personnel marry this person I guess I right now you know well I I'm the one who went to college and studied this career and now I'm in this job I guess I'm gonna you know like this trailing off of your life where you're like wow this fan and you know that tone that people fall into where it's like this helpless well this is the city where my family lives so I'm staying here yes exactly yes the gist dadada and then just it just keeps going and and somewhere in the pages of Eat Pray Love at different various moments all of those people saw me questioning that and saying but what if your life actually does not have to look the same tomorrow as it looks today what if it doesn't have to be the same next year's it did 10 years ago what if you can say I made a grave error here because a younger version of myself who didn't know what was coming made this choice and now the older version of herself or himself who's standing in this position can see this is not working you know and and then what and what I think is so moving is that so often the really important statement is this is not working for me and you do not need to have the next answer to be able to say that I think a lot of the reason that people won't say that is because the next immediate follow-up question is well then now what are you going to do and you can say i don't know i don't know you don't have to know but it begins with not this right not this start there and that's another thing that needs to be often spoken aloud before you can move on to the next point so seeing person after person after person in those essays have this moment of realization not this not this anymore we're done and then crawl their way or fly through or dance through or like cry through the process of now what is one of the most interesting things I've ever watched it's beautiful and I'm super honored to be part of it I don't know anyone who's ever lived their whole life autonomously um we're connected we're connected and no matter how and ran does she want to get I n ranjish you want to get about you know um it's all coming from me you know I am the agent of my own destiny yeah to a certain extent of course a great deal that is coming from you but there were moments in your life before you can remember where you were totally helpless and other people had to take care of you there will be moments in your life again when you're totally helpless and other people will have to take care of you and in the meantime we're all connected by this this interweb of in this network of emotions and inspiration and and assaulted violence and and hate and love I mean it's worth stuck with each other and we have these outrageously adept senses you know we have site and we have hearing we have sound we have a motion all the stuff where vehicles were antennas we're just sort of walking in tennis to collect data and information from the outside world so of course it's coming from the outside and then it goes in and then comes the weird part of the alchemy of turning it into whatever it's going to turn into but what you have to figure out how to be is the cleanest most sober and I use that in all the definitions of that word antenna and if you're spending your life so afraid of your senses and so afraid of your feelings and so afraid of the world that you've muffled that antenna with whatever you can muffle it with you know with alcohol with drugs with food with self-hatred with television with like with blame with rage you know like whatever you've put around that thing is preventing you from being able to pick up the signals that are supposed to come to you you know I'm supposed to awake and alert and receptive and engaged and present to as much of what's going on as you can my favorite books of all time today acknowledging that the list might be different tomorrow and I'm just spitballing this off the top of my head are David Copperfield by mr. Charles Dickens Middlemarch by George Eliot leaves of grass by Walt Whitman The Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert and the final fifth one wolf hall by hilary mantel a bunch of 19th century books in one sixteenth century oh well my storied karaoke career I feel like has not gotten the coverage that it deserves um I recently discovered karaoke so we have I live in the small town frenchtown New Jersey has tiny little bar at the basement of this old hotel where every Wednesday night is karaoke night sometimes five people come sometimes seven people come and some friends and I we start going as a joke sort of but it very quickly stopped being a joke and it very quickly became the most important part of our lives to the point that we will call each other on a Monday and start planning what we're going to be singing on Wednesday and and there's something I've realized that publix singing public collective singing is a very important part of being a human being there's no traditional culture in the world that does not engage in public collective singing you breathe together you feel together you exalt together you get tension out of your lives together it's really vital and we don't do it anyway I'm unless you belong to a church and you sing in a choir which less and less is something that people have in their lives you don't have a venue for raising public voices in the world and so Carrie okay has become I believe the new church choir total eclipse of the heart if you're going to sing here's the thing let me help you out with this if you're going to sing karaoke if you're going to do it you gotta sing an anthem so you got to do that or you gotta do livin on a prayer or you gotta do another really good one is faithfully it's very very excellent any journey song basically is very good and the rule of karaoke is the same as the rule of life which is the only way to embarrass yourself is to not throw yourself into it one hundred percent that's it otherwise you look dumb but if you're like one hundred percent committed you always look kind of cool no matter how bad it hurts you

Channel: Audible

Views: 28,861

Rating: 4.909091 out of 5

Keywords: Elizabeth Gilbert, Audible, Big Magic, Creativity, Eat Pray Love, City of Girls, The Signature of All Things, Committed, The Last American Man, Pilgrims, writing process, inspiration, eat pray love movie

Id: FhWuETfNF3E

Length: 44min 37sec (2677 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 10 2020