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CO S M I C U P LI N K Love your stillness VITHALC NADKARNI IN AN art exhibition held in Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Andy Warhol once wrote that in the future, everyone would be world-famous for 15 minutes. He was talking about ephemerality of fame in the information age. Or it could be about democratisation of the media, or even about the future power of reality television. What about celebrities who got to hog their 15 minutes of world fame, repeatedly? The writer Elizabeth Gilbert belongs to this category. She got her third chance under the spotlight when she wrote her memoir, Eat, Pray and Love. This was after she literally ate herself out of depression in Italy, went to an Indian ashram for yoga and meditation and ended up in Bali, where she met a medicine man who read her palm and predicted that Gilbert would have more good luck than anyone he had ever met and that the writer would live a long time, have many friends and experiences. Gilbert’s textual epiphany became a mega-bestseller and she became a cult-goddess for millions of soul-searching women around the planet. Of course Hollywood had to follow with that Queen of the chick flicks, Julia Roberts, cast in the role of the protagonist who successfully converted a prayer rug into a love mat. Now that the movie has been released, the medicine man’s prophecy seems to be coming true once again. So what if they have photoshopped Gilbert out and replaced her with a Diva? On her part, Gilbert says she had never understood why so many people embraced her book. When she watched the movie she finally figured out that it was more than just a spiritual journey. According to her, the book was also the story of how difficult it was to get over a broken heart. Every person in the story — herself included — had either disappointed someone, been disappointing themselves, was afraid of love or was beginning again at love. “So it is all about how hard intimacy is. How much we long for it and need it,” she says. “That's everyone's story. That is where we all are in our lives; trying to figure out who we are in relationship to those around us and how to get over our disappointment.” But there is no universal prescription, she warns. What worked for her was spiritual practice, months and months of trying to still her mind. A monk told her that silence was the only true religion, and stillness was the remaining luxury. You have to create that sacred pocket of stillness for yourself.
