The Pool meets Elizabeth Gilbert: The Director's Cut

is a book about creative living which is a slightly different term than creativity my definition personally of creativity is that it's the intersection between humans labor and the mysteries of inspiration which is kind of grand but my definition of creative living is much simpler creative living is any life that you live where your decisions are based more strongly on your curiosity than your fear that's that's it and if you consistently habitually routinely at every sort of intersection and decision in your life make decisions that are based on curiosity rather than fear then you will be engaging with creativity at some level at some point and it won't look like my life and will look like your life it will it won't look like anybody else's life because everyone's curiosity is different so everybody's path the following curiosity will have a different outcome but um your life itself will sort of become a work of art if you can consistently live that way not easy but so worth it so worth the trouble everyone is a creative person it's the hallmark of our species I don't divide I'm stealing this line from my friend Renee Brown but here we go I don't divide the world between creative people and non creative people I define the world between people who use their creativity and people who don't we are all creative your ancestors were my ancestors were it's the hallmark of our humanity and the essence of our creativity as as human beings and what differentiates us largely from every other species on earth is this weird burning desire to take nothing and turn it into something or to take a thing and redesign it into another thing or to take something broken and fix it or to take something that's this way and flip it upside down there's this desire to manipulate our world for better or for worse every inch of this planet has been altered by human creativity by this desire to change things that the way it is isn't good enough which other animals don't seem to suffer from this you know like deer don't walk around the forest being like we need to move all of these trees to this side of the river you know we I guess beavers do when they when they dam things and they manipulate their world a little bit but but we do it kind of restlessly and relentlessly and some of it is kind of an engineering project to make human life easier and to be more practical but a lot of it isn't a lot of it is just a kind of aesthetic choice I want to decorate this thing I want this to be a different color I want this to sound differently than it does we all seem to have this impulse to sort of leave our handprint on the wall of our life and say I was here and I changed things around a little bit while I was here and then after I left things were different than they were before I arrived and I don't know still to this day as much as I've spent my life engaging with this and writing about it and thinking about it why we have these impulses I just know that we have them and that if they are not expressed bad things happen inside the neighborhood of your mind they need to be it needs to be done we need to be working with this at some level or another unused creativity is not benign it becomes a sort of engine against yourself and and so my book is really about trying to give people permission and entitlement and the liberation to start to work with their creativity again even if they haven't done so in years um I don't know what you mean I don't know what fear is I totally know what fear is I look I'm a poster child for this stuff because I am inherently a naturally an incredibly fearful person I'm operating constantly at like 90 percent fear threshold I'm afraid right now I woke up afraid I'm gonna go to bed afraid I was born afraid I always sort of been tremulous with fear but my only saving grace in my life is that I am 1% more curious about the world than I am afraid of it and that's all you need it just has to be one gram more curiosity than fear it's not about eradicating fear it's not about eliminating fear it's not about this I think of a particularly American thing that's going on right now this idea of like kicking fear in the ass and punching it out showing it who's boss this kind of extreme sports language that a lot of people are using around fear that doesn't work for me because anything I ever fight in my life tends to fight back harder so anytime I've ever tried to attack fear it just decides to show me how much more powerful than me it is and it just roars to life in a much bigger way so that whole war against fear doesn't really work and so for me it's always been about well what do I have that's slightly stronger than fear and for me it's just about kind of curiosity wonder inquisitive miss I'm terrified to see what's on the other side of that hill but I really want to see what's on the other side of that hill I'm terrified to see what will happen if I try to do this project but I'm also like slightly more curious to see what will happen and oftentimes when my fear arises which it does non-stop I try to engage in a conversation with it and so the first thing I do is thank it which I don't think we do enough I don't think we show enough gratitude to our fear all it's trying to do is keep you alive and save your life so I thank it for caring about me and trying to protect me and then I try to explain to it what I'm doing and why we're doing this and I know that your job is to tell me all the worst outcomes that can happen but I really want to do this and if it still won't back down I usually come to my fear and I ask it for its alternative suggestions you know okay so I want to do this project and you my fear are telling me not to so what do you have to offer me what's your suggestion and when you challenge it like that the answer is always nothing it has nothing to offer it never has a better idea it has never once had a better idea it just doesn't want me to do anything it would just prefer that I stayed in a darkened room with a cool damp cloth on my forehead hiding from the world forever and that's not gonna do it for me that's not an interesting enough alternative and until my fear gives me a better idea than the cockamamie weird jacked up idea that I have I kind of have to do the cockamamie weird jacked-up idea because at least it's a thing you know because the alternative is always do something even though it might not work and people might not like it and you might not make money from it and it might be strange and it might be a disaster at least it's a thing the alternative that fear always offers is a blank piece of paint I got nothing for you just don't just shut it down just nothing and for me when the alternative is so clearly between something and nothing I'm just not nihilistic enough to go with nothing you know I'm just curious enough to have to go with something which isn't a sort of act of faith that it's going to work I had a letter recently from a woman who said I think I'm about ready to start writing my book but I'm just afraid that I don't want to start until I'm convinced that the universe will give me the outcome that I want like yeah that is never going to happen the universe might not give you the outcome that you want we're not children here like we all know jump in the net might not catch you but the universe will give you an outcome it's going to give you something you're going to know more about yourself than you did at the beginning of the things certainly it might not be what you wanted it might not be what you expected but it'll be something and always always always given the choice between something and nothing I'm going to have to choose something well that would have to be personal because I feel like with creativity even my failures the stakes are so low you know I mean this is the thing that I'm always trying to tell people about artistic endeavor the stakes are so low the stakes are so low like very rarely is somebody going to die or have their heart broken or have their life upturned because a poem that you wrote didn't work you know or an essay that you tried to write didn't work if I write a book and people don't like it they're not going to come to my house and shoot me you know what I mean I mean it's a be exaggerating but it's I think sometimes we in the world realm of creativity to blow the stakes up to something so much higher than they possibly are I've heard a lot of comics say that the fantastic thing about doing stand-up which i think is the scariest of all art forms is to bomb and then to walk offstage and you're like oh oh that didn't work and I'm still here that's amazing the worst possible thing that could happen happened and nothing happened you know I'm still intact I'm still in one piece so so my creative failures have that feeling to them where it's like wow that totally didn't work and I'm totally fine we're all going to live it's totally fine my personal failures have a much deeper bass note of pain in resonance because the consequences seem to be much bigger so my divorce for instance I would say that my first marriage was the biggest failure of my life and the consequences of that were very real people's lives were harmed by that this was a case where two families had come together and become one family and then they were riven by a divorce and a heartbreak and people lost each other in that and years were lost and resources were lost and people aged terribly and hard things had to Ino hard things happened that were very real and those failures are so much more resonant in my life than you know any creative failure could possibly be anytime I've harmed somebody and believe me I know every one of them and when I'm awake at 3 o'clock in the morning that's what I'm running through is man I blew that you know I was so unkind to that person when I could have been more patient I really came up short there as a human being I that was a real loss of my generosity total generosity fail on that with that person wow did I really need to spend those two hours sitting with a friend gossiping about somebody who wasn't in the room not cool no not a good enough person like all of my failings that hurt me are the failings of where I feel like my humanity has failed and then of course those are also the biggest lessons and and the hardest hardest lessons but yeah those are the worst ones those are the painful ones because people get hurt and injured and that's where it goes bad but you know for a book to fail we're all okay you know no one's lying awake 3 o'clock in the morning crying cuz my book didn't work you know but I've done things to people that that harmed them in a way that had lasting impact on them and that matters but the rest of it doesn't really matter you know um Eat Pray Love changed my life in a billion ways but I mean we can start at this sort of most material level and go down to the most sort of subtle level but at the most material level I had very wealthy because of this that was not something I ever expected or planned for in my life when I committed to living the life of a creative person as and as a writer I'm so non delusional about what that probably means that I really felt as a young person that I had taken a vow to poverty like a nun not to celibacy in my case but to poverty absolutely and I was fine with that and so that was very unexpected and and it brought great liberation and it also brought great accountability because I felt like okay very few creative people get this kind of wealth and glancingly few women have ever had this kind of wealth from their own work so do not waste this being stupid like don't pull a Mike Tyson here and by 6 white Siberian tigers actually I think it was three that he bought but anyway use this well use this well use this charitably well use this in your family's life well and use this creatively well you now have the Liberty to do whatever the hell you want creatively because I no longer have to subsidize this in other ways I don't have to go to like so for me the best use of that affluence that came after Eat Pray Love was to write the book the signature of all things because here's a conversation I didn't have to have I didn't have to go to any publishing houses and sit under a fluorescent light office and say to them hey people who just published my confessional memoir about my journey around the world guess what I want to do now I want to write a 500 page historical novel about a virgin in the 19th century who spends her life studying moss and botany can you give me an advance for that because no one would have like they don't want me to write that book but I don't but I can now I can actually just say well because I want to do this strange creative endeavor I can and what I really should be doing because I'm in a position to be comfortable enough to do it is the hardest thing I can possibly do I should be writing the books that women never got to write I should be writing the books that are like require an enormous amount of research require an enormous amount of travel and require an enormous amount of creative autonomy because to do so is the only way to honor all those women who came before me who didn't have that kind of opportunity didn't have that kind of space didn't have that kind of time so I think the message that that came to me was don't go small now like don't play it safe now because now you have what everybody wishes they had which was freedom and autonomy so that was huge the other huge thing was getting an audience of women all over the world who welcomed me into their lives and trusted me with their community enormous and that's continued for me on social media and in live appearances where I feel like we are having this giant circular conversation about what it means to be a woman right now and I'm so honored that people let me be part of that conversation in such a big way the funny thing is that after April of became so when it went like tsunami in the world people would say to me your life must be so crazy now this must be so crazy they made a movie Julia Roberts played you your life must be so crazy now and my it's taken me years to figure out how to articulate this but that's not what it felt like my life was crazy before April I did all the crazy in my life in my 20s and 30s long before anyone ever heard of me or knew about me Eat Pray Love was the beginning of my sanity like that journey that I took and those questions that I asked and that research that I did in that year that I devoted to myself was when I stopped being crazy and everything that came after that was frosting and benefit but it was like there was this tornado going on around me but I wasn't a tornado anymore that was the really cool thing all my tornado was before that so I feel like the greatest gift eat Pray Love gave me was it made me sort of calm just in time for when I became a public figure because if I had had that kind of success in my 20s before I was a grounded person I would have been getting out of limousines with no underwear it would have not been I was not ready for that kind of thing but it happened at the right moment and and and then all I could be was grateful and and watch it and be like wow that's really interesting can't believe that happened but be sane at the middle of it which was really a great blessing never mix shades of red now um the best advice my mom my mom was a nurse and back in the 70s she worked for Planned Parenthood at the beginning of I'm not going to say the beginning of the birth control movement because that was obviously a lot earlier in the 20th century but right after Roe vs. Wade in the United States she was responsible for opening one of the first family planning clinics in the town next to the town where I lived I spent a lot of my childhood there she may not even remember having told me this but I remember asking her one time what her job was like and this was when I was a teenager and I was asking her this and she said I meet a lot of women at the moment of one of the biggest decisions that they have to make in their lives and they come to this clinic and they have to make very real very important very life consequential decisions about what they're going to do now and she said all I can ever say to them is such a beautiful sentiment I don't know that I've ever heard anybody else say it so well she said all I can ever tell them at that moment is you can only make this decision based on what you know today and so what you're going to have to do whatever you decide to do about this pregnancy about this person that you're involved with about this situation that you're in all you know is what you know right now and the decisions going to have to be made based on that so you are going to have to pre forgive yourself for what you don't know yet and it may be that years later when you have more information about your life and about the world you may look back on the decision you made this day whatever it is and you may wish you had made a different decision but you have to begin right now forgiving yourself from what you can't know yet I feel like that is the most compassionate possible advice that anybody could be given when they're making a difficult decision in your life and then later to go back and look because we spend so much time mired and regret about things we should have known things we should have done things we shouldn't have done and at some point there's this mercy that you have to show to yourself that says every decision I've ever made in my life I made based on what I knew then and that's all I had to work with you can't know something before you know it it's just a rule of life and and I think about some of the stuff I've done in my life and how stupid it was and I look back on a younger version of myself and think how could you have not known better and the only compassionate and merciful response is because I didn't yet and maybe I had to do that terrible stupid thing in order to learn so that I could become a more mature person who wouldn't do it again maybe I had to do it 10 times maybe I had to do it for 15 years maybe had to do it for 30 years but you're not going to learn something until you learn it and then at that moment you must immediately forgive younger versions of yourself for what she didn't know yet and you must in advance like I have to sort of look ahead and be like I know that when I'm 56 I'm going to look back at myself now at 46 and be like how could you not have seen you can't see what you don't see yet and I think what we're most missing in our lives both in the public level in the private level and in the personal level is mercy you know just the sense of the mercy we're all doing the best we can with what we know at any given moment and we simply cannot do better than that I can't you can't your family can't the world yet it's all we've got so be a little gentler with yourself and with others and their mistakes as well I would like to not die with the same problems I was born I think sort of your job as a human being and you can see this any way you want to see it you can see it karmically you can see I think part of your job is to shed some of the stuff along the way so I don't want to be 90 and still be struggling with the same stuff that I was struggling with it 15 that just feels like I didn't come very far you know so it means there's a bunch of stuff I still have to get better at you know I want to get better at forgiveness of myself and others I want to get better at patience I want to get better at passion I want to get better compassion I want to get better at essentially when I get better at managing my emotional life and creating less problems and getting better at solving the ones that are there my friend iyanla Vanzant has a great line where she says you know most of us with the problems in our life she said sometimes I hear people talk about their problems and I want to say to them walk up to the nearest mirror and slap the first person you see because that's the person who's responsible for all the trouble that you're in right now you know we are the greatest generators of our own drama and our own problems and so a lot of it for me is just about continuing to find strategies and solutions for getting out of my own way so that I cause less trouble for myself so that when I look in the mirror I'm not looking at the biggest troublemaker in my life I would like the biggest troublemaker of my life to be somebody else for once because it's so far it's always been me but to just get like clear out all of that learn better learn better don't have to make the same mistake 20 times maybe 19 times and so that by the time I'm sort of finished I'm just like shed as much of it that I possibly can rather than accumulating more and more trouble more and more drama more and more errors shed get rid of some of it along the way and my husband has a wonderful line to where he always says darling you have to forgive yourself for all the mistakes you made in your past so that you can have room for all the mistakes you're going to make but you want to let stuff go I want to be lighter um I have a friend who always says in all the ways that matter I'm getting younger every year I'm not getting younger physically obviously I'm aging I'm getting wrinkly I'm getting tired my joints are hurting all that stuff is going but in all the ways that matter I want to be younger every year which means lighter lighter lighter lighter ever lighter rather than happier and I've seen it done I've seen people do it so those are my role models I spoil myself all the time I feel like I have the most spoiled life in the world but when I whoo and I really want to spoil myself um that doesn't involve consumption coz that's an easy way to do it which works you know like normally it'll be buying another cashmere charcoal gray sweater how many of them do I need seven more apparently that gives me a nice little endorphin hit right away but the deeper one would be turning off all the electric appliances and beeping things and ringing things and buzzing things and texting things and going to the beach going to the beach for a day with a book and a magazine oh my god this is the most delicious amazing thing in the world to be by the sea on a sunny day with reading material that is not pixels but actual pages that's the business right there that'll take five years off your life just in one afternoon women inspire me I think this is the most interesting possible moment to have been born a woman and the luckiest not to say that there is not an enormous amount more work to be done obviously and certainly the biggest work remaining to be done for women is to address at every level the endemic violence against women Gloria Steinem says this all the time this is the single biggest problem that's facing the women of the world is sexual and physical violence and political violence against women and that is an enormous epidemic that isn't just in poor countries or in poor families or in poor societies but but everywhere needs to be addressed that said if you had to roll the dice for the best chance that you have to be born in a female body in human history it's right now it's right now in the industrialized modern Western world I have choices about my life that my grandmother's and their grandmothers and their grandmother's grandmother's never could have dreamed of I have power an autonomy and agency in my life beyond anything that any woman who ever came before me my genetic line ever had and the wonderful thing about that is of course this whole open new world of possibilities the scary thing about that is that unlike men I can't actually look back at my ancestors for role models of how to be because my female ancestors lives were so different from mine they might as in another species of animal in me and so we're all figuring this out as we go it's still a really new idea in in the world to have women have power like radically new idea there's not a lot of role models and so I can't even look to my mother's life to see what does it look like to be a educated financially autonomous create somebody with creative agency somebody who has agency over her own biology somebody who has agency over her own time over her own body in a way that so many women before us never had I I don't I can't ask her because she wasn't living in the world that I'm living in my grandmother certainly not as much as I admire them and I can learn from them in other ways their lives do not look like my life so we're making this up as we go along and that's really exciting and I think the greatest service that we can offer to each other as women is to do that in the most creative and courageous possible way courage is contagious creativity is contagious hope is contagious power is contagious all of this stuff we can spread from one of us to the next which is also why I love so much the social media conversation that I'm involved with every day on Facebook and on Twitter where women all over the world are talking about how are you doing it I feel like everyone's in this sort of experimental rat science maze looking over walls at each other's lives like how she has your sister doing it how's your boss doing it how's your cousin doing it how how are you managing this um children no children marriage no marriage like everyone's sort of taking notes I've said this a million times and I'll say it forever because it's such a great way of living but the guru who I studied with in India her foremost advice and line and kind of mandate to everybody was become a scientist of your own experience that's where it all is and that can be becoming a scientist of your own spiritual journey becoming a scientist of your own psychological journey the coming a scientist of your own relationships becoming a scientist of your own emotional journey all of it is about watching yourself very carefully studying what works what doesn't work being daring to try a new experiment and then if that one doesn't work doing another one so you're sort of in the lab of your own life and and I love that I love everything about that so much more than being a passive bystander letting your life happen to you and then just sort of sitting there being assaulted by you know the missiles of life that are coming at you without participating in it I would so much rather be engaged with it in a really intimate serious kind of curious way than just being like oh well this is happening you know and I find it really frustrating when I see I think probably nothing frustrates me more than watching powerful people pretending that they're powerless makes me insane if you're right now at this moment in Western history if you're illiterate you know like if you were lucky enough to get an education if you're lucky enough to be able to read and write if you're lucky enough to live in a society where you have a vote if you're lucky enough to live in a society we have any rights whatsoever over your body and your time in your life and you're still walking around acting like you're chattel and it's such an insult to all those who came before you who actually had no agency over their lives and it's an insult to all the women in the world millions of them who have no agency over their lives you have agency use it do something try something fix something if it doesn't work try again but good lord don't become your own oppressor when all the oppressors have been removed and the last one is you sort of sitting there holding yourself down that's nonsense we can do better righteous ferocious self accountability is what's required of women at this point if you have any good fortune in your life whatsoever Oh on a big night I will enjoy the cocktails on a very big night out that feels to me like something fantastically special so anything with a sort of gin fizzy lemony maybe a little sugar around the rim something in a light green something in a light a sort of golden tone that would be what I would like to drink I don't do it very often I don't have the resources for recovery that I used to have I think it's something about being 46 but I used to be able to bounce back from that kind of night a lot better but now I have to really decide I'm going to lose the next three days of my life to this um is it worth it are the people that I'm with really worth that is this going to be a night to remember that it's so worth doing that I'm willing to kind of have no energy for the next three days and mostly the answer to that is no because what I want to do day by day to me at this point is so exciting that I sort of want to be present for it you know I want it like there's there's a there's a sense if you're if you're kind of in the zone of your life there's a sense of waking up every day and being like what do I get to do today what do I get to do today that's exciting and I have enough of that in my life that I sort of don't want to spend it on cocktails till five o'clock in the morning anymore sometimes sometimes I do and when I do it usually involves karaoke and it usually involves friends I haven't seen in a long time and it usually involves like New York City you know and staying up all night and that can be fabulous but it's rare that that's better than what it feels like to wake up at six o'clock in the morning and be like what do we get to do today what do we get to work on today a I have a friend who has this great rule for how to revitalize your life and he said never never give up the great for the good and and his point was that most of our lives most of us spend our lives doing things that are good you know we're not like a bunch of Darrell likes generally speaking you know we get up and we do everything we do is probably good like taking care of family good doing this calling your friends good doing emails writing Christmas cards good there's a list of stuff you have to do none of it's bad going to work paying bills exercising it's good it's all good it's all good it's fine and there's a lot of it but the problem with that model is that a year goes by and no day was really different from any other day and then 10 years go by and no year was really very different from any other year and like the calendar pages just keep flipping and all you're doing is showing up and being kind of good and diligent and responsible and my friend kind of went through a big nervous breakdown and finally realized I'm doing all this good stuff but I'm never doing anything great and so the question that he asks himself every day when he wakes up is what's the one great thing I could do today and maybe a few good things have to go and maybe I have to drop some responsibilities and obligations that are sort of good in order to do one thing today to be freaking great and for him he's a minister who has three kids but for him that's surfing because that's the greatest thing that he could possibly do where he feels like he's not just paying bills and waiting to die where he feels invigorated and alive and so he went through a huge amount of effort to change his life and move his family to live on the coast so that he could serve and and the first thing he does every morning is the great thing gets up at five o'clock before the rest of the family's awake and he serves and that's the great thing and then the rest of the day can be about the good thing you know the obligations the responsibilities which are fine they're all fine and and so I feel like if if I can honor that question and wake up every day and say what's the great great great thing that we could do today and sometimes it's hanging out with a friend who I love and never see sometimes it's a kind of passionate burst of exercise sometimes it's a creative endeavor sometimes it's working toward reconciling a relationship you know maybe there's somebody who I'm on the outs with and the really great thing to do today would be to reach out to them and try to see if we can kind of open our hearts to each other that would be great so maybe the grocery shopping won't get done and maybe everybody will eat cereal for dinner again and maybe the lawn won't be mowed and and maybe the car won't be washed and maybe the things that are the good things to do won't get done but the great thing is the thing and that way when you reach the end of the day the end of the year the end of your life you can be like that was a really great experience that wasn't just me chicken like checking off things on a to-do list until I died this was me being a scientist of my own experience and asking what would be great and your grades not going to look like mine but that's okay it's going to be your own and that is the big magic that is the ultimate artistry of creative living right there

Channel: The Pool

Views: 36,053

Rating: 4.9586205 out of 5

Keywords: Elizabeth Gilbert (Author)

Id: kQWWsxmGFsI

Length: 36min 5sec (2165 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2015