We took the girls up to Sydney this past weekend to see the Sunday matinee performance of ‘Wicked’.  It was pretty fantastic.  The two leads – Galinda the Good Witch and Elphaba the Wicked Witch of the West – played by Lucy Durack and Jemma Rix respectively – were just incredible.  If you have the opportunity to see it, you should.  Especially if you can see it with a couple of kids.  They loved it, which always makes my enjoyment of anything that little bit more special.

The only thing scarier than the winged monkeys in The Land of Oz were the crazies on the streets of Sydney.  Our kids aren’t used to seeing slightly unhinged homeless people up close.  At breakfast we were sitting on the verandah of an outdoor cafe and a man came up to our table and asked for loose change before being moved along by the manager.  At lunch, an old woman wondered into the cafe we were in and rattled a moneybox in our faces.  At dinner, there was a man standing outside the restaurant, randomly shouting obsceneties at pedestrians and diners.  The girls didn’t know quite what to make of this; it’s true, we just don’t see many people like this in Canberra.

When I was living in Sydney I was shouted at by a man like that one.  He came right up to me and screamed something in my face.  Totally freaked me out, both because of the noise and the very aggressive invasion of my personal space.  He’s lucky I wasn’t a Black Belt, I’d have decked him without thinking twice about it.  At the very least I wouldn’t have felt so scared.  And maybe that’s why we enrolled our girls in Karate lessons; so they wouldn’t feel threatened if situations like that.  They haven’t done karate for about a year, though.  Maybe we should get them back into it.  Maybe I should do it too (there’s a threat I’ve made before).

I think it’s important for young people to be aware that there are others in our midst who are not as fortunate as some.  One day I would like to take them to a place where the differences between the haves and have-nots is stark, and we can do something practical to help (ie a ‘volunteering holiday’ in south-east Asia) but I’m happy to leave that particular lesson until a later date, when they are a bit older and have the maturity to make sense of it all without despairing at the state of the world.  At the moment, while Ella still needs the storyline of fairy tale musicals explained to her during the interval, I think I’ll just let them be kids.

OK, I’m going to post the 1500-word version but first I want you to go and read THIS article.  It expands, very eloquently, on part of what I was trying to articulate, which is the idea that you should not have to spend lots of money or travel to the other side of the world in order to achieve Inner Peace.  It talks about the ‘priv-lit’ genre (“privilege literature”) that perpetuates this notion that it takes a big investment of funds to embark on a successful journey of self-discovery, and so that journey is really only open to rich chicks…

For decades, self-help literature and an obsession with wellness have captivated the imaginations of countless liberal Americans. Even now, as some of the hardest economic times in decades pinch our budgets, our spirits, we’re told, can still be rich. Books, blogs, and articles saturated with fantastical wellness schemes for women seem to have multiplied, in fact, featuring journeys (existential or geographical) that offer the sacred for a hefty investment of time, money, or both. There’s no end to the luxurious options a woman has these days—if she’s willing to risk everything for enlightenment. And from Oprah Winfrey and Elizabeth Gilbert to everyday women siphoning their savings to downward dog in Bali, the enlightenment industry has taken on a decidedly feminine sheen.

OK, here’s my 1500 words (actually, it’s 1019).  Remember, I didn’t post this in the end because I wasn’t happy with it.  It’s unpolished, partially formed, not particularly well written.

There are a zillion books on how to find your true authentic self, how to search for inner peace, how to be the person you wanted to be, how to forgive yourself and forgive your mother and forgive your dirty rotten ex-husband… there are a zillion books that aim to help you to help yourself when you reach that point in your life when you start screaming at the bathroom mirror at three o’clock in the morning, asking WHY, WHY, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME?  And maybe WHO ARE YOU?  And SHOW ME THE MONEY!

So why is it that some books are more successful than others?  Why is it, for example, that Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, “Eat Pray Love” walked off the shelves by the millions all around the world and inspired a movie starring Julia Roberts?  What’s so special about Elizabeth Gilbert’s story?

Here’s what I think.  You’ve got the quintessential Heroine (Liz), being called to action (messy divorce, unhappy rebound relationship, and a publisher who needs her to write another book), hatching a plan (“I know! I’ll go to Italy and India and Indonesia!”), embarking on a quest (“I’m going to eat and pray until I achieve Inner Harmony…”), meeting various Wise Men and Women who give her advice and guidance on her journey (the Texan at the ashram in India, the medicine man in Bali, and finally Felipe), all the while overcoming her demons (“Must. Stop. Thinking. About. Ex. Husband.”) and achieving personal and spiritual goals along the way.  It’s a story that’s got everything… drama, sex, good food, exotic locations and even more exotic men. It’s a cracking good story.

And… it’s got a woman who makes a decision one day to COMPLETELY rethink the direction of her life.  She leaves her home town, leaving a trail of broken-hearted men, and heads off on an adventure that the rest of us can only dream about or experience vicariously through her.  Lucky cow, we all say.

But then we think ‘hang on a minute.’  Here’s a woman whose journey was sparked because of the unhappy and bitter and painful end of a relationship, was possible because she didn’t have children, and was funded by the publishing company that was hoping she’d come out at the end with a best-selling ripping yarn to tell.  She was unattached, unencumbered and fully funded.  She had the motive, and the means.

The only criticism I’ve heard – and I have heard it from a few different people – of Elizabeth Gilbert’s book is that she was selfish and a bit whiny.  Personally, I didn’t find her selfish, but I can see how some readers might be put off by her attitude.  Women especially are encouraged not to be selfish, but to be utterly UNselfish.  Give, give, give.  Nurture, feed, clothe, wash, care for…  Do unto others as you would have others do unto you if you could afford to hire some good help.  The idea that a woman would rack off overseas in search of Inner Peace seemed, to some readers, a very selfish act.  Well, maybe it could be considered selfish, if she had left behind a husband or children or an ailing, elderly parent.  But again, Elizabeth Gilbert was beholden to noone.  Say it with me, ladies: “lucky cow.”

I think you can embark on a journey of self-discovery without buying a round-the-world ticket.  Or leaving your husband and kids.  You don’t have to completely ruin the life you already have or, more importantly perhaps, ruin the lives of your family and friends, because you’re having a crisis of identity.  Some people do; hands up those of you who knows of a man who decided he didn’t want to have a family anymore so walked out on his wife and three young children in the middle of the night without saying goodbye and moved 6000kms away where he shacked up with a trollop called Leah and her two children (who are almost certainly called Chardonnay and Tallon) and updated his facebook Religious Views to read “Do whatever you have to do to be happy!” ?

Sorry.  Bitter tangent.

The point is, I don’t think you need to be in a crisis or depressed or divorced or anything like that to stop for a moment and take stock of your life.  Everyone deserves the chance to gaze deeply into their navels and make a few changes in their life, and that part isn’t at all selfish.  The dictionary definition of selfish states that you do something for yourself at the expense of somebody else.

So what word can we use instead of selfish, to describe the act of doing something for yourself that also benefits somebody else?  What’s the word for mutually beneficial selfishness?

Sorry, that was two points: a) don’t wait for a crisis to reassess your life and b) don’t cause another crisis by doing so.

Eat Pray Love changed my life… because…

… because if you ignore for a moment the nasty divorce and the book advance and the lack of dependents she was, in the end, just a regular person on a journey.  And she allowed herself to be guided by – what I like to call – ‘the Universe’.  She followed her instincts and didn’t question them, and ended up with a wonderful new life.

Whether or not your journey has been inspired by some kind of disaster, and no matter how far you travel, the thing that seems to be important in a journey of this kind is that you go with the flow, have faith in yourself, be optimistic and be open to whatever comes along.  Since reading this book I have quit my day job and started a portrait photography business and have been recruited by an international airline to write travel tales for their website.  Neither of these things would have happened to me if I doubted myself, or doubted that I somehow deserved it.  None of this would have happened if I hadn’t been just a little bit selfish and asked the Universe for it in the first place.

I wanted to say, in my original post, that I’m just an ordinary person who decided to do something to change the direction my life was taking and that if I could do it, you could do it too.  Elizabeth Gilbert wasn’t ordinary: she had no dependents and a big book advance.  She is the quintessential privileged woman on a journey.  Well. I guess you could argue that I’m a bit like that too: I’ve got the opportunity and the means to travel.  But here’s the thing… this journey of mine started well before I quit my job and got that phone call from Thai Airways.  This journey of mine hasn’t always required massive investment of cash or nicking off to a Silence Retreat or even signing up for a regular yoga class.  It started with the slow realisation that I wasn’t quite following the path I thought I should be on.  It’s like acknowledging the problem is half the journey.  Once I did that, once I said out loud that I wanted things to be different, THAT’S when the opportunities started to flow.  And that’s the point I was trying to make.