Despite its sizable potential quotes, there’s a line from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love that is surprisingly stuck with me. It is said by the protagonist’s inner voice when she was on the brink of a mental breakdown, not knowing what to do, and wanting to run away from her life. The line was simple and nothing extraordinary. “Go back to bed,” it says. Yet it was the thing the protagonist needed to hear.
For the past few days, lines just like the one above have crossed my path. And also just as the one above, I have come to like them. They all have something in common. They are simple, they are real, and yet, they work.
I believe I’m somewhat an optimist, but I certainly have little care for fairy-tale hopes. Movies like Serendipity, as much as I am entertained by them, don’t hold a candle to my real-life perspective. And it doesn’t help that I was raised Catholic, which mostly involved a heavy dose of embracing reality as it is. I am mostly detached from words that leap too far from reality. Overly optimistic promises of love, success, health don’t ring much in my soul. And so do every life advice that are based on those promises.
However, unlike those advices, the lines that I like are not built on over-the-top promises. When the protagonist in Gilbert’s novel heard her inner voice, it didn’t tell her to leave her life, or stay with her husband. It also didn’t tell her how everything would pan out. It merely told her to do the only thing possible for her at the moment. “Go back to bed,” the voice said. And so she went to bed, which so happens ultimately led her to where she was meant to be.
Another line, “Everything worth doing is worth doing poorly,” also have come to my liking. It is not about doing your job irresponsibly, though. It is about not letting too-high expectation prevent you from doing something good. Amazingly, it doesn't only work for people who have more grounded perspectives in life, but also for people with depression, or people who have lost their hopes. If you can’t shower, wash your face. If you can’t exercise, go out from your house and have some sun. This kind of thought invites such people to move and do something. Because just like how sometimes form precedes essence, doing something, no matter how mundane, enables hope to reemerge. And for the people who are already with hope, it does something greater. If you can’t do kindness to the whole world, do it to this person in front of you. If you can’t write something that will touch a lot of people, write something that will touch yourself. Because everything worth doing is so worth it, that doing it a little is better than not doing it at all.
And even when such lines turn to more optimism, they still remain within the bounds of reality. Just like in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which despite its flaws, has delivered one of the best lines that answers the question about why we should hope. “And even if we fail,” the character Gwen Stacy said, “What better way is there to live?” For me, this simple line answers the question of why we should hope beautifully. It doesn't jump into promises of outcome that it can't possibly keep. It stays in the real. It answers the question by giving value to hope itself, and not to what it aspires to attain.
In the end, I guess the reason the lines attract me is because their comfort doesn't require me to believe in something that may be far-fetched from what I see everyday. They only talk about the now, what you can do, and how valuable it actually is. They don't talk about some prize at the end of the road, because the prize is already here, in the form of the simple actions, and in me doing those actions.
