500 days of summer

19 January, 2012
Look Again
“Next time you look back, look again” was, in conclusion, the sentence that made the movie 500 Days of Summer have a great importance in my life. The idea is that a person should think about situations from different perspective and more than once because he or she might realize something that they missed the first time around. A person might have missed something that will help them accept a fact, or something that will help one understand, and gain a sense of maturity that might have not been there before. The point is that after one sits down and calmly looks back at an event from the past and opens their mind they will realize something and this will help them be more accepting of something in their lives that they were struggling with. In 500 Days of Summer, Tom Hansen doesn’t understand why the girl he loves broke his heart because in his eyes everything was going so perfectly. Until one day he’s talking to his younger sister and she tells him “Nothing was perfect, next time you look back, look again”, which makes him realize the signs of trouble in his relationship were there all along. In life, the sentence that Tom’s sister says always applies in my opinion. Nothing is completely one sided. One will always have positive and negative aspects in their life and in situations in their life. Sometimes at first an event can seem completely one way (positive or negative) and it takes time and thought to realize how there are good and bad factors in everything. Sometimes it can be difficult to realize this because when a person’s emotions are involved, they make everything so much more complicated than they need to be. One major event in my life where this mentality has helped me was when my grandfather passed away. My family and I were very sad by his death and it depressed me for a long time. On the other hand, one positive thing that came from it was that our family came together. My two aunts who had fought years ago and stopped talking to each other got over their differences and decided to forgive each other. At first sight my grandpa’s death was completely negative but after talking to a friend about this she made me realize that without this tragic event my aunts would have never talked to each other again for the rest of their lives and my family wouldn’t have become as close as they remain to this day. The movie 500 Days of Summer affected me in that it reinforced the fact that nothing is completely white and nothing is completely black. The colors are blended to form more of a grayish color. At first sight things can seem one way and sometimes it takes a lot of time, energy and even pain to realize this but it’s always true. Usually the negative is only at the surface and if a person digs deep one realizes there’s so much more than what can appear at first. Our experiences in life always leave us with good and bad but it’s up to us to realize that and make the best out of it.