Eat, Pray, Love

If I love you, you can have everything. You can have my time, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dog's money, my dog's time- everything. 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 project 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.

Chapter 13Understanding of travel talentBest traveler in the writer’s eyes“I’ve met travelers who are so physically sturdy they could drink a shoebox of water from a Calcutta gutter and never get sick. People who can pick up new languages where others of us might only pick up infectious diseases. People who know how to stand down a threatening border guard or cajole an uncooperative bureaucrat at the visa office. People who are the right height and complexion that they kind of look halfway normal wherever they go—in Turkey they just might be Turks, in Mexico they are suddenly Mexican, in Spain they could bemistaken for a Basque, in Northern Africa they can sometimes pass for Arab . . .”How about the writer’s travel talent?(She seems a travel -talent-proof person.)“My shaky sense of direction and geography means I have explored six continents in my life with only the vaguest idea of where I am at any given time. Aside from my cockeyed internal compass, I also have a shortage of personal coolness, which can be a liability in travel. I have never learned how to arrange my face into that blank expression of competent invisibility that is so useful when traveling in dangerous, foreign places. You know—that super-relaxed, totally-in-charge expression which makes you look like you belong there, anywhere, everywhere, even in the middle of a riot in Jakarta. …My face is a transparent transmitter of my every thought. As David once put it, ‘You have the opposite of poker face. You have, like . . . miniature golf face’”Cockeyed 歪的;斜的 If something is cockeyed, it looks wrong because it is not in a level or straight position.Liability 累赘；负累；负担 If you say that someone or something is a liability, you mean that they cause a lot of problems or embarrassment.Chapter 14"My stomach is gripped in horror and I’m gasping for air and praying he won’t call on me. Just as soon as the break comes, I run out of that classroom on wobbling legs and I scurry all the way over to the administrative office almost in tears, where I beg in very clear English if they could please move me down to a Level One class. And so they do. And now I am here."Scurry急匆匆;赶忙 If people scurry to do something, they do it as soon as they can. Wobble 摇摆;摇晃 If something or someone wobbles, they make small movements from side to side, for example because they are unsteady.Chapter 16"Depression and Loneliness track me down after about ten days in Italy……They come upon me all silent and menacing like Pinkerton Detectives, and they flank me—Depression on my left, Loneliness on my right. They don’t need to show me their badges. I know these guys very well. We’ve been playing a cat-and-mouse game for years now…."(personification)Chapter 17“I stopped eating meat (for a short time, anyway) after someone told me that Iwas ‘eating the fear of the animal at the moment of its death.’ ”(That sentence strikes me. Is the fear of the animal chewable? I am not a veggie. It is a little bit appalling to think that way. )The writer’s attitude towards antidepressant“I do know these drugs made my misery feel less catastrophic. So I’m grateful for that. But I’m still deeply ambivalent about mood-altering medications. I’m awed by their power, but concerned by their prevalence. I think they need to be prescribed and used with much more restraint in this country, and never without the parallel treatment of psychological counseling. Medicating the symptom of any illness without exploring its root cause is just a classically hare-brained Western way to think that anyone could ever get truly better. Those pills might have saved my life, but they did so only in conjunction with about twenty other efforts I was making simultaneously during that same period to rescue myself, and I hope to never have to take such drugs again. Though one doctor did suggest that I might have to go on and off antidepressants many times in my life , because of my “tendency toward melancholy.” I hope to God he’s wrong. I intend to do everything I can to prove him wrong, or at least to fight that melancholic tendency with every tool in the shed. Whether this makes me self-defeatingly stubborn, or self-preservingly stubborn, I cannot say.”

The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously amid extremes? What if you could somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing? My truth was exactly what I'd said to the medicine man in Bali—I wanted to experience both. I wanted worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence—the dual glories of a human life. I wanted what the Greeks called kalos kai agathos, the singular balance of the good and the beautiful.

Now I realize why I could read this book smoothly and instinctively -- Like mine, the heart of the author is avid for a worldwide excluding nothing.

“You have more good luck than anyone I've met. You will live a long time, have many friends, many experiences. You will seethe whole world. You only have one problem in your life. You worry too much. Always you get too emotional, too nervous. If I promise you that you never have any reason in your life to ever worry about anything, will you believe me." 我也有这个毛病。担心和犹豫，害怕自己做不好。其实二者不仅剥夺了做事的快乐，还容易影响自信心。当然，不担心也不代表什么都不用管，任时间流逝，兵来将挡水来土掩。好好准备，好好体验，在担心、犹豫和害怕上少花点时间。