meet me in the middle

Time for a round-up of some events I've attended recently:

Last Tuesday (2/20): I went to a reading at Elliott Bay Books by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, one of my favorite books from last year. The basic gist is that Gilbert, after suffering through an awful divorce, takes a year off to travel, spending four months in Italy, four months in India, and four months in Indonesia. In these settings, she finds herself, finds God, has a spiritual journey, finds out who she is, realizes her own strength...all these things that sound like cliches when I type them now but are incredibly powerful and beautifully written in the book. This was an amazing reading, because Elizabeth Gilbert is an amazing woman. She was able to poke fun at herself yet still gracefully defend her choices and her writing. Every answer was completely beautiful and witty and wonderful...even as she was saying things, I'd be wishing that I was taking notes so that I could remember exactly how she said it, and re-read it to myself when I was feeling low.

A good takeaway lesson from this event: Everything we do in even the tiniest of little ways influences everyone around us. She remembered a time that she was going home from divorce court on the subway, and she just broke down and sobbed. She said that looking back, she has a great deal of compassion for herself, but she also had a lot of compassion for all the people around her, who all had their own problems and lives and were just trying to get home, that had to witness a complete stranger break down. She took the responsibility for herself, to take care of herself and make herself happy. For her, this involved taking the year off to travel, and she was upfront about acknowledging that not everyone gets to do this.

Last night, Monday, 2/26: After a delicious happy hour at Nijo Sushi, we went to a lecture by Dereck and Beverly Joubert that was part of the National Geographic Live series. Their topic was "Relentless Enemies: Lions and Buffalo." They had some amazing pictures and film of lions and buffalo being relentless enemies. That's a simplistic way to put it, because the pictures were accompanied by their tales about how they got the footage, what they were discovering about these animals, and other things related to the mystery and wonder of nature, but when it all came down to it, we wanted to see the footage of these animals trying to kill each other.

A good takeaway lesson from this event: I am glad I don't have predators that hunt me on the street and try to eat me. Also, don't marry a man who wants to spend life in Africa, getting close to dangerous animals.

Tonight, Tuesday 2/27: Tonight Clair and I went to the University of Washington to hear Tracy Kidder, the writer of Mountains Beyond Mountains, speak. Mountains Beyond Mountains is the UW Common Book, meaning that all freshmen were told that the book would change their lives. The book is about Paul Farmer and how he changed the face of public health in places like Haiti, Peru, and Russia. For being a book that students were supposed to read, very few students were there. The format for discussion was also fairly poor, as three people from disparate backgrounds tried to ask profound questions with little cohesiveness. But I guess that's the point of a Common Book; everyone can take something from it. The book is incredibly interdisciplinary in the topics it covers....science, anthropology, sociology, religion, history...the list goes on and on.

While I am interested in learning more about Paul Farmer and the work he's done (we missed him when he came to UW last year), I was interested in seeing Tracy Kidder because of my background in Creative Writing. From a writer's perspective, he was in a weird place of presenting this subject because he obviously believed in the cause and wanted to advance it, but he's also just gotta be trying to tell a good story and perhaps meeting some sort of journalistic standard. While he got questions about both these roles to some extent, he never really owned up to either side, making me confused about his place in this. Are you still selling me on Paul Farmer and his cause, or are you selling me things about how to live a good life in general, or are you just selling me your next book?

Anyways, after the discussion, Clair and I had Indian food and had the deep, profound conversation that the Tracy Kidder program had lacked. I'm too tired now to recreate it, but suffice it to say, we thought of like three great ideas for the next Common Book program and solved at least two of the world's problems. And talked about work.

A good takeaway lesson from this event: You don't have to be Paul Farmer and live in Haiti and minister to the sick to make a difference. What you have to do is figure out what you're good at, and figure out how that can solve a problem. As Tracy Kidder pointed out, Paul Farmer needed a guy to be great at business, make a ton of money, and then agree to finance things that seemed unreasonable in terms of what they could accomplish in third world countries.