Book Review: Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
In this book, Liz Gilbert talks about creative living. It’s mainly about pursuing your passions and how to treat every obstacle that come your way as an opportunity. She also touches on the subject of how our actions, big or small, actually opens up a door to our possible big break.
Big Magic came to me at the right time. I was struggling to find purpose in life and this book kinda gave me the motivation to start again. There were 3 main points in this book that actually made some sense and brought me out of the guilt I was feeling towards my work.
You shouldn’t suffer for your passions. I grew up with the notion that if you were an artist, you had to suffer – like it was mandatory – for your work. There’s nothing like a tragic artist behind their masterpiece. If you want great art, then you’d need to suffer greatly first. Liz abolishes this mindset by talking about how to actually care for what you love and that you don’t have to face a tragedy in order to come up with something beautiful. Sometimes, we simply have to work with what’s around us.
Ideas have life. Have you ever experienced having an idea pop up out of nowhere? Sometimes, they just come up despite having to stare into blank space. I’m sure you have. Here, she talks about ideas as if they are an entity. She believes that ideas jump from one person to the next and it’s up to an individual if they are going to take action towards it. Most ideas stay for as long as they can, waiting for you to do something about it. But sometimes, they leave just as quickly as they came. She then proceeds to tell a story where she was in the process of writing a book about the amazon. But because life happened, she had to postpone her writing. Several years later, when she tried to go back to it, it was just gone. One day, she meets another author who surprisingly was in the process of writing a story exactly the same as her amazon concept many years back. Liz was taken aback because she’s never shared her story to anyone. Ideas essentially go to people who they think can bring it to fruition. If you think an idea is not for you, simply talk to it and tell them gently to move on to the next best person.
Taking action can open doors. Life is like a domino effect. One decision, one action will lead to another. Here, she shares a story of her friend who was under depression because of life circumstances. He no longer had any energy in him to create anything at all until one day, his daughter asked him to paint her bicycle, which he did. When the other kids in their neighborhood saw the painted bike, they also wanted their own bikes painted. And he did. The mere action of painting these bikes opened up an idea for him to create his next book. It’s amazing how taking action on some things, even those which are beyond our comfort zones, actually bring us closer to whatever we love. The same thing happened to Liz when she had an idea to build a garden in her home even though she had no clue on how to care for plants. This little idea actually led her to writing The Signature of All Things.
Reading this book reminded me to stay in the present and to be thankful for what I currently have. Most of the time, we’re so caught up wanting so much more, we forget that what we have now is something that we prayed for. This is a great book to read if you’re looking for a purpose or ways to “spice” up your life. It does bring a little perspective about how we approach our own creative living.
