Our job is to keep looking for the work that transforms us

I finished reading Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert. 

It took me forever to read Eat, Pray, Love, and when I did, it was, of course, amazing.

I'd heard that some of her readers were disappointed in Committed, because it didn't transform them like her other book did.

Not Elizbeth's job. Her job is to write the books she's meant to write.

Our job is to keep looking for the work that transforms us.

SPOILER ALERT--if you plan to read the book yourself, avert your eyes:

"Even the Stasi of communist East Germany--the most effective totalitarian police force the world has ever known--could not listen in on every single private conversation in every single private household at three o'clock in the morning. Nobody has ever been able to do this. No matter how modest or trivial or serious the pillow talk, such hushed hours belong exclusively to the two people who are sharing them with each other. What passes between a couple alone in the dark is the very definition of the work "privacy." And I'm not just talking about sex here but about its far more subversive aspect: intimacy. Every couple in the world has the potential over time to become a small and isolated nation of two--creating their own culture, their own language, and their own moral code, to which nobody else be can privy...

"We were shaping our lives in that particular form of partnership because we yearned for something. As so many of us do. We yearn for private intimacy even though it's emotionally risky. We yearn for private intimacy even when we suck at it. We yearn for private intimacy even when it's illegal for us to love the person we love. We yearn for private intimacy even when we are told that we should yearn for something else, something finer, something nobler. We just keep yearning for private intimacy, and for our own deeply personal set of reasons...

In so doing, I have finally found my own little corner within matrimony's long and curious history. So that is where I will park myself--right there in this place of quiet subversion, in full remembrance of all the other stubbornly loving couples across time who also endured all manner of irritating and invasive bullshit in order to get what they ultimately wanted: a little bit of privacy in which to practice [L]ove. Alone in that corner with my sweetheart at last, all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

The idea of subverting the grid, the authorities, the culture at large, by participating in private intimacy against all the odds inherent in that bold undertaking, lights up every single blissmonger self-reliance corpuscle I possess.

So thank you, Elizabeth, for writing again in the wake of Eat Pray Love. And for doing it with intention. You chaperoned your thoughts to where you could be who you really are.

And all manner of thing shall be well.