Chaotic lives

I'm currently reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. And by "reading" I mean "listening to the mp3 version on my ipod nano while I walk around Boston and make pottery." Someone had suggested this book to me since it is about a woman who takes a year to live around the world and, for lack of a better phrase, soul-search. It is super interesting, and while there are a lot of things I can't relate to (praying on her bathroom floor, living in Rome and drooling over the hot Roman men, living in an Ashram in India) there are many things that I do. An excerpt, below, I found particularly cool... it's about a building in Rome that has survived 20 centuries being reinvented for dozens of uses:


"I find the endurance of the Augusteum so reassuring, that this structure has had such an erratic career, yet always adjusted to the particular wildness of the times. To me, the Augusteum is like a person who has led a totally crazy life, who maybe started off as a housewife, then unexpectedly became a widow, then took up fan dancing to make money, ended up somehow as the first female dentist in outer space, and then tried her hand at national politics.... yet, who has managed to always hold an intact sense of herself, throughout every upheaval. I look at the Augusteum and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic after all. It is merely this world that is so chaotic, bringing changes to all of us that nobody could have anticipated."

I dont really agree with her conclusion, but I have for years loved this idea of living a life of reinvention. I want to be that woman who is a fan dancer, dentist, politician, and who knows what else. Well, actually, I think I'd make a mediocre fan dancer and horrible dentist... I want to be a business woman, a world traveller, a writer, a politician, a potter, a high-school civics teacher, a producer for NOVA, a baker, a mother, and maybe a couple other things. I think the world has so much OPPORTUNITY for chaos, and that people dont take enough advantage of that. It is so easy to keep going on a straight path (or what SEEMS straight, at least,) but I want to be 8 different people all wrapped, strangely but somehow in a way that makes sense, in one.


Does that make me a schitzo? I like to think it makes me ambitious... ;)