So for Christmas, my wonderful husband bought me the Lord of the Rings boxed set. It has the full Lord of the Rings trilogy and the prelude, The Hobbit. Of the Middle Earth stories, I’ve watched the trilogy, seen the first season of Rings of Power, and caught glimpses of The Hobbit movies; but I’ve never actually read any of the stories. I decided I wanted to read the series after all, to see what the real story was like. You know, find out what was the same and what was different.

Anyway, I started with the Hobbit, finished reading and then watched the first Hobbit movie all the way through. The storytellings are so different. I understand that changes have to happen for the sake of a movie, but it ended up being really disappointing. Now I’m a book nerd, so I always prefer the books over the movies. But I haven’t been so sad about a change to a story since the Twilight movies (and I still haven’t seen them all).

I think what really saddens me when this happens is the forced identity these retellings create. It helped me to recognize, on a much deeper level, that perspectives are often shaped by people’s perception of things, and when those perceptions are misinformed or under-informed, what you get is a misplaced assumption of someone’s character. I tend to prefer the way authors tell stories. They take more time to build characters and allow room for you to come to your own conclusions about them.

That’s something I do in my own life. I’m slow to box people in. I prefer to experience life with people, so that I can get a full understanding of who they really are, as opposed to making assumptions based on limited information. Basically, I don’t put everything into first impressions. I allow your life to tell me who you are. How about you? How do you approach people?