Why Bother to Connect the Dots?

My young son loves doing dot-to-dots. He started with the very simply ones that form an outline of a figure or object and has recently graduated to the more complex puzzles in which lines cross to make intricate patterns, revealing in the end detailed images. Connecting the dots in life gives us a chance to gain an understanding of the events in our lives that reveals an intricate pattern.

When we experience life as a series of random events, we can feel at most times that we are either catching our breath, losing our breath or wasting our breath. Peace seems like an illusion because Life seems random.  Learning to step back and see the full picture can help us begin to live less out of reaction and more from intent.

Identifying the large themes in life can be both rewarding and painful. For some of us, the broad patterns are about where we came from – our family of origin, choices in dating and marriage, traumatic experiences. For others it’s spiritual crisis, betrayal, or ongoing feelings of depression. Whatever the theme in your life, often it repeats itself until you “get it.” In part, that’s because we respond to it in particular ways until we learn its lessons.

Ways of “Being” in the World

I’ve found that whether we are engaging the themes in our lives, are running from them or are simply oblivious to them, each person tends to have one way that he or she engages life and takes in the world.

For some, “to be” means to know. They take in and engage life in their heads. Life is about ideas, about figuring out what might happen (especially the bad stuff), or simply about finding ways to distract oneself. Unfortunately, worry, over-intellectualization, and trying to find ways to avoid reality leave little time for genuine emotion, connection with others, or spiritual engagement. In fact, even the pursuit of these can become another exercise of the head.

For others, “to be” means to feel. They embrace life, and especially people, with warmth. But they have their own way of playing games. The emotional awareness is a pointed way of gaining others’ appreciation and love, admiration, and even of achieving success. But intense, maybe even exaggerated, emotions are exhausting for a person. One can become tired and drained.

Still others seem “to be” by acting. They use power and their sense of “rightness” to bring about their version of justice and to try to fix the people and messed up world around them. They “feel” life with their bodies. But feeling constantly punched in the gut by life and others is also draining. And spending energy fixing everyone else can be isolating.

Henry Nouwen, a theologian and brilliant scholar whose most profound learning happened when living with and caring for the mentally challenged, states “peace is first of all the art of being.” Being is an art that is learned and developed. We are all born running from the patterns in our lives. But we can embrace the lessons of life by learning how to “be” simply for the sake of being. To be – just as you are – requires self-acceptance that is rooted in ruthless self-examination and learning to understand how you receive what life hands you. It is learning to pay attention to the Real. As John Calvin put it, “there is no deep knowing of self without a deep knowing of God – and there is no deep knowing of God without a deep knowing of self.” To learn to truly know and accept self is part of learning to know and accept the Real that is bigger than ourselves. And learning to accept the Real is part of learning to accept self.

Connecting the Dots

So to begin connecting the dots requires first an understanding of the lens through which you receive life. Your understanding of the pattern in the dots will grow as you learn to embrace new ways of seeing Life. And as your capacity for perceiving the Real grows, you will begin to answer questions like What are the patterns in my life? And what do they mean? What do they tell me about myself and my way of seeing Life and Reality? How do these patterns point me toward the Real?  How do I come to know God in the midst of these patterns?  And what does it mean about me that these are my patterns?

And with awareness comes the possibility of change. Until we understand the ways we perceive and respond to life, we live by compulsion. When we see that our mode of “being” in life is simply one of many options, we can live differently – we become able to “simply be.” And peace becomes a possibility.

Photo by Today is a Good Day used under Creative Commons License