Book Review: Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey. (INCOMPLETE)

This is another one of those books I picked up because of my admiration/ facination with the author. Although most of my facination of Matthew comes from the interviews of him I have seen on the internet over the years and not from his movies (most of which I must admit, after reading the book, have not watched or even heard of). 

I'm going to try and keep this one short as I am still trying to find it in myself to write consistently. I am happy to share that I have been able to write consistently even a few short lines daily for the last 3 months or so although I have not shared any of it anywhere since they were all journal entries. But the reason why I am sharing this here is because of Matthew. (I don't know why but calling him just Matthew and not by his full name feels weird. But also I am not going to type in his full name because that will be a handful). Anyways before I stray off too far, I heard from one of his interviews that he has been maintaining a journal/ dairy from the time he was a teen and has been writing in it daily to this day. Which sounds amazing and his book is proof of it. He not only shares about things that happened in his life chronologically but also about what his thought process was like back then and even about what he saw in his dreams. You can probably only get that if you kept track of your thoughts, feelings, dreams and life experiences by journaling. 

So for me, who has always known the benifits of journaling but hasn't been able to be consistent at it, this book was a good way to show myself how journaling can help me with my dream.

Like I said earlier the book also highlights a lot of the important events that happened in his life and this man has no doubt had an interesting life filled with experiences and adventures and even some hardships which I will not be talking about in detail. But at the same time having read about these amazing/ interesting adventures of his I also do want to talk about them because some of these really made me think. Think about a lot of things.

One example would be the one year he spent in Australia during his high school days as an exchange student. The first thing that came to my mind reading through this segment of the book was just the coincidence of me being in Australia now as I read this because ever since I heard that this book came out I wanted to read it but I couldn't get my hands on the book back in Bhutan. Then after I finished reading about his stay in Australia (which was very interesting by the way) I reflected on what I read which is something I don't do usually when reading books. At first I felt a little jealous because getting to live and study abroad as an exchange student was unheard of for us. And even if there was such a program we never heard about it. I only knew about exchange programs like these from movies and shows that I watched as a kid. And I heard about Bhutanese students going out on these programs only after I was done with my schooling. I thought about how, if I had gotten such an opportunity, my life would have been different. I know there is also the possibility of not much changing but at least coming to Australia two years ago wouldn't have felt so overwhelming. 

The other thing I remembered was my own experience when I went to college for the first time in India because we kind of had a similar expereince in some sense. After we got off the train at Secunderabad we were picked up by a bus from our college. We travelled through the city for a while before getting of the national highway. We kept travelling for what seemed like a eternity back then and as we kept travelling, the settlements kept getting thinner and the roads narrower. I will stop here because this is turning out into not a book review territory.

Oh, and also this is when Matthew started journaling because he was getting homesick and he needed to do something keep his mind off what he was going through. If I remember correctly, he also turned vegetarian for a little while during this time.

These are the 10 life goals he jotted down back in 1992 and from what I have read and heard and seen about Matthew in all these years I believe he has achieved most of them if not all. Just look at the list; He said he'd win an oscar back in 1992 and in 2014 he did exactly that. But that's not the goal that caught my attention.

The first goal on his list was to become a father. Now I have always wanted to have kids of my own (as if the letter to my future kids wasn't proof enough) but I never thought of becoming a father. This may not look like two different things but they definitely are. Looking back I think I loved the idea of having kids but maybe I was not ready for the responsibilities of a father. 

This book review is incomplete. I took so long that I have essentially forgotten what I read to continue writing this review and I don't think I will go back to reading the book anytime soon just to write this review that no one is going to read so I'll keep this incomplete. but still post it.