I started doing yoga about a year and a half ago. My favorite class is on Monday mornings with A. At the end of class, she opens up a notebook. The notebook’s pages are tattered, which is the only possibility for a notebook owned by a yoga teacher who wears what I think are floral leggings but might be leggings with cats and spaceships on them. I would know what kind of leggings she wears if I wore my glasses to a yoga class that controversially starts at 6:45 a.m. instead of 6:30 a.m., when it used to start and when the class’s devotees wish it still started. I wanted the class to start at 6:30 because I would like to be a person who goes to a yoga class at 6:30 a.m., but I am perfectly happy for it to start at 6:45.
At the end of class, A opens her notebook and reads a bromide. At least, if you can call a couple lines from Mary Oliver or Sufi a bromide, she reads a bromide. Which I think is a fair description of lines read at 7:35 a.m. as people sit cross-legged in a yoga studio above a Chipotle and lit by morning light as garbage trucks pull up outside. I like this part of class very much. At the beginning of class we set our intentions for class, and I also set my intention for the week, and I very much enjoy hearing A’s bromides at the end of class and sitting cross-legged and having the luxury of living a life where I can be intentional about setting my intentions.
In this book, Oprah talks to many of her friends and tells us about her life, a series of successes earned through hard work and guts and talent. Many of the people she talks to have lived similar lives. Steve Pressfield, who, according to his website, wrote for nearly three decades before publishing his first novel, tells her that “the more important an activity is to your soul’s evolution, the more resistance you will feel to it.” I found this quite profound because sometimes it is fucking hard to write, and I think I would like to be a writer, but I also find many wonderful ways to avoid writing. (My current favorite is to read and drink coffee in the mornings, which I at one time dedicated to writing, but reading and drinking coffee, I tell myself, are important for learning about what good writing is, and thus avoid writing.)
Another of Oprah’s friends asks the question “What is the lesson that took you the longest to learn?” and I think this is an incredible question to ask because it gets at our fears that we’ve overcome. One answer offered in the book is how to be happy alone, which is a hard and wonderful lessen to learn. I do not have any quick answer to this question, but I know that the next time I sit around a table with close friends and drink wine I will ask this question and thus continue to be the friend who’s very bad at simply chatting about the weather.
This book is also woefully ableist at times. One of Oprah’s friends, Deepak Chopra, tells her that “chronic fatigue and depression are ways in which we withhold our full participation in the program of life that we are offered.” It is 2019 and it is too late in the day to forgive this statement. When my mother had cancer in 2006, she was told that God gave it to her because of some fault in her own belief and also that God gave it to her as a way to grow in character. These were shitty statements, and Chopra’s is no better. Illness can limit a person’s ability to search for meaning—because they must, for instance, spend time going to the doctor’s office or managing their pain medication instead of walking around a sunny city and listening to a book by Oprah—and the suggestion that those with illnesses are somehow to blame for the continuation of their illnesses only stigmatizes those people and makes it even harder to find purpose. (One imagines a doctor telling a patient with chronic fatigue that they should just stop “withholding their full participation in the program of life,” whatever that means.)
And the book is also concerningly classist. Oprah, who did not grow up rich but is rich, talks to her friends, who are rich, although some of them note that they’ve fallen from heights they’d once attained (for one, this means falling off of the New York Times bestseller list after many weeks on it, which she was emotionally unprepared for). They talk about how success is not defined by how much money we have but by how closely we live out our life’s purpose. I would like this to be true, and I think it is probably true, but it is also true that for many, if not all, of the people in this book money has accompanied their success. Reading it, I wondered how much happier the world might be if someone were to take most, if not all, of their money and give it to people who must spend their time thinking about how to make rent or feed their kids (or pay for medical treatment for chronic fatigue) instead of what their life’s purpose is.
But I liked this book a lot. I drank it up in a day while walking around a sunny city on a lazy Saturday when I had nothing to do but go to a yoga class (not A’s, sadly) and meet a friend for a drink. Oprah and her interviewees live lives focused on their purpose, and a joy radiates from the voice of people who believe in purpose and who’ve managed to find purpose and live out that purpose. It is inspiring and hopeful to hear this. I, and most people, would be happier if we found purpose and lived close to that purpose. And it is a gift that I am mindful of to have the luxury of wandering on a lazy Saturday and being able to think about purpose.