Make Your Damn Bed 852 || Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
I recently finished the library copy of Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert - who you may know from Eat, Pray, Love fame - and if I’m honest I read it in college ish and was not a fan. I judged her hard, and because of it - I avoided content until recently when clips of her offering incredibly insightful thoughts I decided to give her new book - the one she was often promoting with these interviews - a shot. The book is Big Magic. And it’s a fairly short read about creative living and as is always the case with self-help type books, I have a few notes, but overall the book was really lovely and made me think - which is really all you can ask for in a book. It’s a book I’m sure I’ll return to - and may even buy for my own shelf eventually, because it’s about the spark + realigning with it - which as a creative, is a necessary part of the process every once in a while. This book doesn’t define creativity as pursuing a life that is exclusively or professionally devoted to the arts, rather it’s written as a manual with universal aspirations and provides lessons in how to unleash your creativity.
Here are my favorite insights from the book -
On fear: If you pass your hand over a petri dish containing a tadpole, the tadpole will flinch beneath your shadow. That tadpole cannot write poetry, and it cannot sing, and it will never know love or jealousy or triumph, and it has a brain the size of a punctuation mark, but it damn sure knows how to be afraid of the unknown. Well so do I, so do we all but theres nothing particularly compelling about that. Theres no extra credit for being afraid of the unknown. Fear is a deeply ancient instinct. Evolutionarily vital. But it aint especially “smart”.
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