There is a scene in Eat Pray Love that has come to me.
Julia Roberts, alone at a small table in Rome, savouring every mouthful of pasta in the afternoon light. Reading. Unhurried. Nobody needing anything from her. It is, in its way, a portrait of paradise.
The film offers a dream. Quit the life that no longer fits. Follow the thread of aliveness wherever it leads. A language learned for the sheer pleasure of its sounds. Food eaten without guilt. A love found without agenda. Watching it, you almost believe this is simply what a life well lived looks like. Available. Possible. Yours, if you are brave enough.
But the dream has a price tag most of us cannot meet.
And this matters more than we tend to say out loud. When meaning feels structurally out of reach, when the daily texture of life is repetition without reward, when there is no inheritance or savings or sabbatical waiting on the other side of a brave decision, something shifts in the psyche. Scarcity does not stay economic. It becomes existential. The question what is my life for? stops feeling like philosophy and starts feeling like an accusation.
Fear follows scarcity. And fear, when it has nowhere honest to go, looks for somewhere to land. It finds the foreigner. The refugee. The person who looks different, prays differently. The person on universal credit. The logic is old and it is false, but it is also, I think, deeply human. It is hard to sit with one’s own emptiness. It is much easier to locate the problem outside yourself, in someone whose difference can be made to carry the weight of your unexamined grief. Hate thy neighbour has become the ambient rhetoric of our moment. I think this is partly why.
What none of this accounts for is suffering.
Gwyneth Lewis, in her luminous memoir Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book About Depression (Flamingo, 2002; Harper Perennial, 2006), offers a quiet corrective. Her title alone is a kind of theology. You can be in the rain and still be turning your face toward something. Suffering is not the opposite of a meaningful life. It is, often, woven into the very process of becoming one.
We have decided somewhere along the way that suffering is failure. Something to be solved, medicated, scrolled past. But some of the most alive people I know, and some of the most honest moments in my own life, have come through sitting with difficulty rather than fleeing it.
So what actually makes life worth living?
I keep returning to something like self-actualisation. Not the motivational-poster version, but the slower, harder thing: becoming more fully oneself, often against resistance. Work that connects us to something larger than a task list. Play that reminds us we are not only useful. Love, in its widest register. And prayer, or whatever practice returns us to the ground beneath the noise.
Roberts looked extraordinary in that film. The Italian light did its work on me. But what lingered was not the glamour. It was the permission. The quiet suggestion that a life oriented toward meaning is not a luxury. It is a necessity.
The trouble is, we cannot all leave. Some of us have to find it here. In the ordinary. In the difficult. In the midst of what we cannot change.
We carry our armour because we must. But every now and then, in the right silence or the right company, it becomes possible to set it down. Just briefly. And remember what we are protecting.
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