An Excellent Adventure can be all about simple but amazing things that alter our lives in amazing ways. Consider the:

• Simple elegance of Italian olive oil drizzled on asparagus
• Quiet beauty of people meditating at an Indian ashram
• Riotous colors and tropical heat of Bali

As Julia Roberts, in the role of writer Elizabeth Gilbert, experiences a year of personal growth in the movie “Eat Pray Love” away from the hustle-bustle of New York City a few thoughts kept rambling around in my mind.

• The contrast of the three different countries is lovely and startling.
• I probably would’ve wanted to stay in Italy the entire 12 months
• There is much to be learned from people in different cultures
• Next time I eat pizza I’ll see if I can have a relationship with it, too.
• Why couldn’t Julia Roberts get those lessons just by staying home?

I went to see this movie not because of the big hype it’s generating, but, because it sounded like an uncannily authentic example of an Excellent Adventure. It is.

The three countries featured in the movie are lush and rich with culture and history. There isn’t a big box store or MacDonald’s in sight in Gilbert’s Italy, India and Bali. I want to learn to make homemade parpadelle. I want to learn to really meditate. I want to drink tequila and go skinny dipping with a drummer who possesses an impossibly cute tush. (Don’t tell Ernie. *wink*)

Maybe it’s naïveté on my part but I want to visit other countries for prolonged periods of time because I have a quest to know what it’s like to live in a different culture. I want to make friends, write books and discover for myself how other people live.

Gilbert’s story of how she just fell into her life as wife and homeowner, even though she longed for a more adventurous one is compelling. Isn’t it amazing how even in 2010 there are so few life choices? You will marry. You will have children. You will buy a home and pay your mortgage forever. Isn’t it time we open the floodgates to more possibilities?

I’m not interested (at least at this stage) in going to the other side of the world because I desperately must heal my inner child or forgive myself for some past misdeed. I can do that right here at home, thank you. Although I’ve been around the block enough times to know fate will probably intervene, putting me in the path of experiences that create exactly that kind of healing and forgiveness.

I hear Gilbert (in real life) convinced her publisher to foot the tab for her one year sojourn. Nice gig if you can get it.

She goes to these three countries because she wants to find her mojo again. Get her groove on in a very enlightened, spiritual kind of way.

Who are we to argue?