Eat, pray, love.

I have just read this book by Elizabeth Gilbert and it was just fantastic. I thought it would be a pious ‘born again Christian’ type of thing but it was not that at all. It was enlightening and informative and moving.

The author finds herself in a situation she feels she should be in but does not want to be in and to get out of it has to go through great personal torment and upset to do it. She goes against tradition.

I have fought tradition for a while now. You grow up thinking, find a man, get married, have babies and have a family and that’s you, well that’s how I grew up anyway. There never was divorce in my family, well there was one. But it was always get married, have kids, that’s you. I was a rebel, a black sheep. I wanted to travel, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I thought I should have a career and going from job to job was the sign of a loser.

So I became a nurse, good move. I could travel as a nurse and so for a year I did. My family couldn’t understand why I wanted to go. I wanted liberty and to see the world. It opened me up as a person and gave me a confidence I would never have gained any other way.

I hope that my daughter will want to do it too. I will encourage her and hopefully manage to travel a bit with her maybe? If she’ll have her embarrassing mother next to her!

Reading Glbert’s book made me want to pack my rucksack up and head off. It was so simple living out that bag. You couldn’t buy anything because you had to carry it so the more you bought the heavier the rucksack. I had 3 pairs of pants and 3 pairs of socks! Wear one, wash one and one pair drying. It was ace because now with all the pants and socks I have, can I bloomin’ well find a matching pair of socks or indeed a pair of pants when I need them? Nope. I never had that problem travelling.

 

One pair of shoes! One, maybe 2 if you had flipflops. You didn’t have to worry about what you wore out, you wore the same thing to work in as you wore to the pub! I had a uniform for work and it rarely got ironed. I work caterpillar work boots for work! It was just a minimalist existence and boy was it great. The amount of crap I accumulate now in pursuit of ‘happiness’ astounds me. 

How many games consoles? How many pairs of shoes? Coats?

Things, just stuff. Amazing.

I have to have a stable environment now for my daughter but my feet are itching terribly to get going again. There’s so many places to see yet. Let me at them!!!