Eat, pray, read

This Week’s Winner

MANILA, Philippines - Annabelle R. Naig is a St.Theresa’s College-Cebu alumna where she took up AB Masscom. She worked for seven years as news director/DJ/newscaster of 102.7 Star-Fm Manila before moving back to Surigao, her hometown, in 2001.   She has a Master’s in English from St. Paul University System Surigao and is pursuing a PhD in English at University of San Jose Recoletos, Cebu.

There are three things I am wont to do at any given time of the day and they are to: eat, pray and read. In her book Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert said that traveling is the great true love of her life and that for her, it is worth any cost or sacrifice. 

I could say the same for books. I once endured having to stand for two hours in a bookstore as I surreptitiously leafed through the pages of Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture. I finished it on site albeit with a little guilt from the free reading. The sight of a good book always leaves me breathless and the amount of pleasure reading gives me is invaluable. 

I am writing this on the evening of my birthday and a lot of thoughts are sallying forth in my head. Because it is my birthday, I feel the need to take a good, hard look at my life and perhaps map out a plan for total self-improvement.

My waistline is fast catching up with my age so I need to say no to mindless eating and say yes to exercise, to write and read more, save money, spend less time on Facebook, strive to know God better and contemplate on His words, and many other resolves. Certain milestones indeed can nudge us to think about the words of Socrates on the unexamined life and to write things down, to capture thoughts that are parading in our head, to blow a whistle, hoping they might stop.   For Gilbert, it was after she hit an emotional rock-bottom following a bitter divorce that she dealt head-on with depression and loneliness and proceeded to do the things she had always dreamed of in an effort to find balance in her life. She packed her bags and traveled to Italy, India and Indonesia and to the inner chambers of her heart.

I found her to be both funny and pensive and her book provided me with an authentic material when I handled the subject Language and Culture in the master’s curriculum of our school. I marveled how there can be no exact translation for certain foreign phrases to one’s own language. In our country, when we comfort someone who is facing a tough time, we would say, “Kaya mo yan” which, roughly translated, means, “You can do it.” In her conversation with an Italian friend, Gilbert shares that in the US, they would say “I’ve been there,” which prompts Giovanni, her Tandem Exchange Partner, to ask, “So sadness is a place?” Gilbert explains that deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location and that when one is standing in the forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place, but if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, this brings them hope. 

Gilbert’s friend tells her that empathizing Italians would say “L’ho provato sulla mia pelle,” which means “I have experienced that on my own skin.”

In Gilbert’s best-selling travel memoir, she writes about how the people of Bali put a great emphasis on marriage. For the Balinese, to be single forever is unacceptable. To cull a few lines: “If you are a single woman traveling through Bali and somebody asks you, ‘Are you married?’ the best possible answer is: ‘Not yet.’ This is a polite way of saying, ‘No,’ while indicating your optimistic intentions to get that taken care of just as soon as you can.”

Oh, by the way, did I mention that I’m still single? Yes, I’m in my late 30s and still single. That is why I let out a chuckle when I read those lines in EPL or Eat, Pray, Love. The first call I got for my birthday today was from a close friend, a priest, who again reminded me that I seem to have it all and only one thing is missing. 

With a deadpan expression, I replied, “Oh really, what is it?”   He told me not to lose hope (though I didn’t say anything about abandoning all hope) because just a few weeks ago, he officiated a wedding where the bride, a lawyer, was 53 and the groom was also in his 50s. After our conversation, I SMS’d him saying that it was indeed an interesting tale, and as for me, I have long made up my mind to decide on being happy and most of all, to count my blessings and not what I’m missing. 

I have come to accept that in our country, a single woman’s cross that she has to bear when she reaches the ripe-for-marriage age comes in the form of derision, mockery, and ridicule on her single-blessedness state. But, I’ll roll with the punches and I try not to be defensive when I dodge people’s nosy questions. I will not let any negative words affect me, hard as it may seem. An enlightening concept about words was also mentioned by Gilbert in EPL when she writes that Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. For this reason, Gilbert makes a solitary trip to one of the beaches in Bali where she gives herself a 10-day retreat of absolute solitude and absolute silence. I remember asking myself, “Could I ever do what she has done?” Gilbert write that to stop talking for a while is to attempt to strip the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our own negative mantras.

There is another novel idea on the subject of words when Gilbert’s friend tells her that every city has a single word that defines it, which identifies most people who live there. Gilbert opines that for New York, the word is Achieve, the constant word that is on every New Yorker’s mind, and that for Los Angeles, it’s Succeed, and in Stockholm it could very well be Conform and in Naples, Fight. Considering this, I have to say that for my city, Surigao, the word is Family, because ours is a city where a common rush-hour sight, which warms my heart, is that of fathers at the helm of their motorcycles, mothers at the rear, and their little children sandwiched in-between them as the whole family leave or head home. 

As for me, my word is Improve. There are so many things I wish I could be better at. I wish to be a better Catholic, daughter, sister, friend, mentor, colleague, teacher, reader and writer. 

To Elizabeth Gilbert, thank you for taking me along to Italy, India and Indonesia. Mine was a journey inside the pages of your book, a trip that was so enriching as the best pizza in the world you have gloriously described.