Eat, Pray, Love

tracks until I could get a grip on myself might have been the beginning of what my dear friend
Richard from Texas calls my “control issues.” Of course, my efforts and worry were futile. The
closer I watched time, the faster it spun, and that summer went by so quickly that it made my
head hurt, and at the end of every day I remember thinking, “Another one gone,” and bursting
into tears.
I have a friend from high school who now works with the mentally handicapped, and he
says his autistic patients have a particularly heartbreaking awareness of time’s passage, as if
they never got the mental filter that allows the rest of us to forget about mortality every once in
a while and just live. One of Rob’s patients always asks him the date at the beginning of every
day, and at the end of the day will ask, “Rob—when will it be February fourth again?” And be-
fore Rob can answer, the guy shakes his head in sorrow and says, “I know, I know, never
mind... not until next year, right?”
I know this feeling all too intimately. I know the sad longing to delay the end of another
February 4. This sadness is one of the great trials of the human experiment. As far as we
know, we are the only species on the planet who have been given the gift—or curse, per-
haps—of awareness about our own mortality. Everything here eventually dies; we’re just the
lucky ones who get to think about this fact every day. How are you going to cope with this in-
formation? When I was nine, I couldn’t do a thing with it except cry. Later, over the years, my
hypersensitive awareness of time’s speed led me to push myself to experience life at a max-
imum pace. If I were going to have such a short visit on earth, I had to do everything possible
to experience it now. Hence all the traveling, all the romances, all the ambition, all the pasta.
My sister had a friend who used to think that Catherine had two or three younger sisters, be-
cause she was always hearing stories about the sister who was in Africa, the sister who was
working on a ranch in Wyoming, the sister who was the bartender in New York, the sister who
was writing a book, the sister who was getting married—surely this could not all be the same
person? Indeed, if I could have split myself into many Liz Gilberts, I would willingly have done
so, in order to not miss a moment of life. What am I saying? I did split myself into many Liz
Gilberts, all of whom simultaneously collapsed in exhaustion on a bathroom floor in the sub-
urbs one night, somewhere around the age of thirty.
I should say here that I’m aware not everyone goes through this kind of metaphysical
crisis. Some of us are hardwired for anxiety about mortality, while some of us just seem more
comfortable with the whole deal. You meet lots of apathetic people in this world, of course,
but you also meet some people who seem to be able to gracefully accept the terms upon
which the universe operates and who genuinely don’t seem troubled by its paradoxes and in-
justices. I have a friend whose grandmother used to tell her, “There’s no trouble in this world
so serious that it can’t be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey and the Book of Common