Eat Pray Love - Ruin is the Road to Transformation

Finally, I got to watch the movie last night. Probably the first movie adapted from a book, I watched without reading the book (couldn't/didn't want to read it). The reviews were mixed, I think the only thing that made the movie work was Julia Roberts. On the other hand, the book sold millions of copies for a wrong reason - too many single women in this country.

The message from the movie was to get out of our comfort zones and look at the world through different perspectives (it helps to be foragers once in a while and stop being farmers). Obviously, it's advantageous if we could afford to travel to far corners of the world. May be we should skip that "plastic" trip on the cruise and go to Asia or Africa instead. Or without spending a dime and in comfort of our home, we can try living and thinking like some else for few months:

• Conservatives - live and see the world like a liberal
• Liberals - step into the shoes of a conservative
• and so on. We should try to live our worst fears when life is less chaotic (or predictable). 

Bottom-line, we need to get out of that notorious confirmation bias. Unless that happens, we will live and die in our self-induced cocoon's. Life is too precious and world is too big to waste it in self-induced cocoon's.

"A friend took me to the most amazing place the other day. It’s called the Augusteum. Octavian Augustus built it to house his remains. When the barbarians came they trashed it a long with everything else. The great Augustus, Rome’s first true great emperor. How could he have imagined that Rome, the whole world as far as he was concerned, would be in ruins. It’s one of the quietest, loneliest places in Rome. The city has grown up around it over the centuries. It feels like a precious wound, a heartbreak you won’t let go of because it hurts too good. We all want things to stay the same. Settle for living in misery because we’re afraid of change, of things crumbling to ruins. Then I looked at around to this place, at the chaos it has endured – the way it has been adapted, burned, pillaged and found a way to build itself back up again. And I was reassured, maybe my life hasn’t been so chaotic, it’s just the world that is, and the real trap is getting attached to any of it. Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.”


"To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life."