Sunday, February 6, 2011

Reading chick books & pain


So, I was supposed to be in Michigan right now, spending the weekend enjoying a mini-vacation before the move and going to a reunion. U S Airways apparently had other ideas and canceled my flight last night, leaving me stranded in Charlotte, North Carolina for hours before I begged them to just put me back on a flight to Florida. I got lucky and the last flight of the day had been delayed so I was able to get back to Jacksonville at 1:30 this morning. Air travel sucks in this country...actually, amend that: it just sucks period. I'm driving from now on if at all possible.
The only good thing about yesterday is that as I was stranded in the Charlotte airport, I wandered into a book store, looking for something girly and light-hearted to read. I ended up buying Eat Pray Love, and even though I am only a third of the way through it, I highly recommend it. I needed to read about another woman's adventures in making peace within herself and understanding a little more about what kind of faith and love we all need.
Elizabeth Gilbert says at one point as she is finishing up her stay in Italy, "You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight". (Eat Pray Love, pg. 115). I think that as fibromites, those may be the best words we could ever hear. We did not ask for this life that we were given, but it was given to us, and all we can do is make peace with it. 
I am in agony today, everything hurts. I always forget how hard traveling is on me, and if things are made tougher by stupid airlines and their delays and cancellations (leaving me schlepping my luggage and myself up and down the damn airport, trying to get food, drinks, tickets), it's really hard. Traveling is rough on everyone, but for fibromites, it's all amplified. Everything that healthy people go through is magnified. Muscle aches, exhaustion....it's all so much bigger.
But the best part of all of this has been that I bought that book, and I am really loving reading it. I struggle with understanding faith and God ever since I went through a crisis of faith just as the leaders of my church turned their back on my family in Maryland about five years ago. After that, I declared there was no God, and embraced Buddhism and its ideas of balance and karma. But as I read along with Liz's journey's in understanding devotion in faith, and realizing she deserves pleasurable things, and how she learns to balance both of these ideas I begin to wonder if I can find faith again. 
I don't know if I'll ever believe in the Christian idea of what God is again, but I think maybe I can find some kind of faith. Liz describes the comfort she finds in prayer and as a fibro sufferer, I'm willing to explore anything that can give me comfort and strength when things get tough. 
Have you read that book, dear readers? What did you think? If you haven't read it yet, I do recommend it.

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