Eat Pray Love with an open mind..

Never thought I'd blog and never thought I'd become that someone who has a need to share personal thoughts and opinions about minor, inconsequential, non-life changing daily events in a not-so-private way. However, there's always a first time for everything and this happens to be mine..

I am yet to find out what particular event or incident triggered my urge to write but for now I'd like to assume that watching Julia Roberts portray Liz Gilbert in Eat Pray Love was certainly a factor..

With my choices almost always guided by intuition, reading a book and then watching its movie adaptation, has been the norm for me and at most times I've favored the book over the movie. But when I came across the book Eat Pray Love on friends'coffee tables or in book stores nothing about the title or synopsis aroused my interest and watching a movie based on the book was therefore certainly not on my mind. Julia Roberts and a lazy Sunday noon however changed that I caught the movie with a woman friend this past weekend.

When I think of  the movie with an open mind, uncorrupted by the book reviews or my own personal opinion formed from absorbing the contents of the book beforehand, the movie seemed long but easy to watch, arousing my appetite for food, travel and personal transformation. I found parts of it resonate with my own self-discovery journey and its struggles and could relate to her rantings, sudden tears and many more things. I was in a happy place until I tried to wish-list the book on Amazon today and decided to read the reviews before doing so.

What alarmed me was how the negative reviews (which far outnumbered the positive ones) influenced my perception of what I until then considered a simplistic tale of woman's journey of self discovery. I still believe and would like to hold on to that view but the negativity certainly got me thinking. Applying it to life in general I wondered how many times I'd entirely adopted or accepted someone else's thoughts and opinions and made decisions based on that. How many times I'd possibly let myself believe that was the right way to think and how my thinking had been wrong in the first place. And how that probably altered existing relationships, or set the wrong stage for a new one and how my mind refuses to have it any other way in some instances but does show remorse and regret when it comes to some other, giving me the hope that I am still learning and shall continue to do so...

With that said, I'd like to hold on to the view that each one's struggle and journey is different from another's and what floats my boat may sink another's just like what floated Liz's boat seemed to sink many others..