Elizabeth Gilbert Went Back to Bali Expecting Nothing in Particular

At thirty, Elizabeth Gilbert filed for a divorce she wasn’t sure she wanted, from a marriage she’d realized — with no small amount of guilt — she couldn’t stay in. The split was long and expensive. While it was still unresolved, she fell hard for someone else, and when that relationship also collapsed, she went under: barely eating, in what she has described as near-constant physical pain from crying, eventually suicidal, on antidepressants, and by her own account found herself at three in the morning on her bathroom floor, undone. That is the opening scene of the book she eventually wrote.

It was in the middle of that same period that Gilbert remembered something small: on an earlier trip to Bali, a ninth-generation medicine man named Ketut Liyer had told her, more or less in passing, that she would come back one day and study with him. She had no particular reason to believe him and no plan to make it happen. But with a book advance funding a year away and nothing left to lose, she went back — not with a curriculum in mind, just an old, half-remembered invitation and a stretch of time to fill.

She showed up at Ketut’s door without much of an agenda. What developed instead was slower and less legible than a lesson plan: he taught her a meditation practice — sitting, and smiling, on purpose, as a discipline. She tried to teach him English. Mostly, it turned out, he just wanted company, and she had nowhere else she needed to be. Neither of them was managing the relationship toward an outcome. It became one of the central relationships of the book, and by her account, of that period of her life, precisely because she hadn’t gone looking for it to become that.

The invitation had been sitting there for years, unfollowed-up-on, because it didn’t come with instructions for what it would turn into.

This is the part of the story that gets flattened when it becomes a movie poster: it wasn’t a plan that worked. It was a loose thread she was willing to pull on with no idea where it led, at a point in her life when she had stopped needing to know in advance.

What loose thread have you been sitting on because nobody told you what it’s for?