After watching the clip of Elizabeth Gilbert’s talk at the 2009 TED conference on nurturing creativity, I was totally inspired… and very surprised. Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, Eat, Pray, Love had a profound effect on my life. I remember being totally awed by the fact that this woman could drop out of life completely and go in search of herself abroad. If I could have taken any one of those three journeys for even of the fraction of the time she did I would have been ecstatic. I had been longing for years to take a sojourn inward and just be with myself. I wanted desperately to unplug and go somewhere and ponder and write with no distractions and no interruptions. For many years this was my burning desire. So to say that I envied Elizabeth Gilbert would be putting it mildly. Not only did she get to take one year off to travel and immerse herself in foreign culture, she found the love of her life, came to terms with herself, and wrote about it in a book that sold 1.5 million copies. If that’s not “having it all” I don’t know what is.
You can imagine my surprise when I listened to the lecture from the conference. She presents a very interesting and poignant theory about how to better manage the creative process and confesses that she had to do some research on this topic to manage her own difficulties since her book has been published. “What difficulty could you possibly be referring to Elizabeth?” Being mobbed at book signings or getting recognized at the supermarket? Such problems, I wish I had them. No, she’s talking about the possibility that at 40 years old she had already done her best work and that it’s all downhill from here. She’s currently in the process of trying to write her next book but instead has found herself fighting for her creative life. Who would have thought that finally arriving meant coming to terms with the most painful aspect of the artist’s life: that you’ve already said everything that you’re going to say, that anything you do from this point on will always fall short of what you did before. Not exactly the tools of inspiration and as she says in the lecture the reason why many a young artist succumbs to self-destruction.
So I thank you Elizabeth Gilbert for being so public with your struggle because now instead of envying you, I feel for you and I am reminded that we’re all struggling…with something. We may be in different places on the ladder but the difficulties are no less painful the further up you go. We never really arrive. There’s always more to do. It’s all a process. And as the Buddhists have been saying all these years: there is no there, only here.
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