When it comes to Eat, Pray, Love’s Elizabeth Gilbert, people tend to be one of two minds. They either see her as some modern day demi-goddess or describe her in two hyphenated words ‘self-absorbed’. I am in the second group. So it was with some trepidation that I decided to watch the movie.

I did enjoy it overall; Julia Roberts was her usual charming self, the three key male roles were well scripted and the scenery was glorious. But it was in actually hearing some of the dialogue from the book that I was struck by her message about the importance of words.

Sitting in an outdoor café in Rome, Gilbert’s friend declares that every city and every person has a word. Rome’s is “sex,” the Vatican’s “power”; Gilbert declares New York’s to be “achieve”. Later she discovers her own word, antevasin, Sanskrit for “one who lives at the border.”

Describing oneself or one’s life in a single word or even a phrase isn’t easy. One of the best things about the process is that it clears away the clutter of verbiage in our heads, stills the mental conversations and doesn’t allow for anything less than a positive answer.

To describe myself and lifestyle choices I am in a word ‘eclectic’. This adjective started to form with my childhood and has grown richer with the years. We are comfortable together.

Other words that revealed themselves in the movie were “Il bel far niente” an Italian phrase meaning “the sweetness of doing nothing”, or pleasant idleness, and ‘Seva’ which is the Hindu word for “selfless service.” It is unfortunate that the English language isn’t spoken with such eloquence anymore nor do we heed the gentle lessons of other cultures.

As for Ms Gilbert, in spite of this enlightenment I still feel that she is best summed up in a conversation with her Balinese healer, Ketut where she proclaims ‘me, me, me!’