Connecting The Dots Quotes

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

If we don’t manage to connect the dots anymore and the power of our imagination is creaking at the seams, in a world of withering expectations, we have to rewrite the script of our life. ("Into a new life")

Let’s loosen up some time and take a break to re-calibrate our life. We need no endless over-thinking, though. Let’s just connect the dots, set the scene, and steam ahead. ("On a casual day without a tie")

From now on I’ll connect the dots my own way.

Big moments happen with the smallest actions, and sometimes it's not until later we connect the dots, but in that instant, I knew that somehow, someway Declan was going to own my heart.

Does our purpose on Earth directly link to the people whom we end up meeting? Are our relationships and experiences actually the required dots that connect and then lead us to our ultimate destinies?

My lines all curve. I tend to connect the wrong dots.

If you’re worried about giving your secrets away, you can share your dots without connecting them.

Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours--long hallways and unforeseen stairwells--eventually puts you in the place you are now.

Resorting to connecting the dots this morning because it was a long night & he needs to do something really simple to get started again.

Let us not wait until the specter of solitude and isolation crawls into the alleys of our lives. Let us not the veiled threat of despair thrust us into oppression through our deficiency in interaction, and expand the frailty and the anxiety of our existence. Let us reach out and talk instead and use an authentic language in an unambiguous wording, and connect the dots, without fear. ("Words had disappeared”)

Someone once told me that the finer points of devotion are about the size of a pinhole, and there are millions of them. And if you could connect each dot, then you’ve got a diagram of what you think you thought you knew, and if you’re willing to admit that you know nothing…you have the blueprint for a breakthrough.

Connecting the dots. That's what Mom said stargazing is all about. It's the same up there as it is down here, Jackie. You have to look for the things that connect us all. Find the ways our paths cross, our lives intersect, and our hearts collide.

Collecting the dots. Then connecting them. And then sharing the connections with those around you. This is how a creative human works. Collecting, connecting, sharing.

You can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards...You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever - because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path.

The Universe is full of dots. Connect the right ones and you can draw anything. The important question is not whether the dots you picked are really there, but why you chose to ignore all the others.

What are you doing?" I whisper, not at all surprised when he doesn't answer my question. He keeps up drawing patterns for a few minutes, nearly lulling me to sleep, before leaning over and pressing a soft kiss between my shoulder blades. He wraps his arms around me, pulling me onto my side toward him, my back flat against his warm chest."I was connecting the dots," he says quietly. "Your freckles are like stars. They tell a story, depending on how you connect them."I smile to myself as he takes my hand, linking our fingers together. "What did they tell you?""They told me you're beautiful," he says. "And I'm a lucky son of a bitch to have you all to myself.

Make it a quest to never give up even when the dots seem as if they are difficult to connect.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

When you need something to be true, you will look for patterns; you connect the dots like the stars of a constellation. Your brain abhors disorder. You see faces in clouds and demons in bonfires. Those who claim the powers of divination hijack these natural human tendencies. They know they can depend on you to use subjective validation in the moment and confirmation bias afterward.

I know what it's like. I've seen it played out a zillion times. You're waiting for that magical day when someone makes the connection and recognizes who you really are. Maybe they'll first catch the sparkle in your eye. Or perhaps they'll marvel at your insights and the depth of your spirit. Someone who will help you connect the dots, believe in yourself, and make sense of it all. Someone who will understand you, approve of you, and unhesitatingly give you a leg up so that life can pluck your ready, ripened self from the branch of magnificence. Well, I'm here to tell you, your wait is over. That someone, is you.

Were those dots, she doted, connected on any linear pathway, where the past joined with the present as an invisible time chain? Time’s effects were certainly not invisible, no matter how invincible.

Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.” Connecting the dots of our lives, especially the ones we’d rather erase or skip over, requires equal parts self-love and curiosity: How do all of these experiences come together to make up who I am?

My whole body finally connected the dots, and I realized that even if we were never together, she’d ruined me and I’d never feel that way about anyone again.

What are you doing?" I say hoarsely as he trails a finger from the beauty mark on my rib cage to the one on my hip, leaving a path of goose bumps in his wake. "Connecting the dots," he murmurs with a wicked look. "Uh-oh, you made me lose my place. Now I have to start all over again...

A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

The most common communication mistakes? Relating too much information, with not enough time devoted to connecting the dots.

When we were small, Rose and I used to play a game called connect the dots. I loved it. I loved drawing a line from dot number 1 to dot number 2 and so on. Most of all, I loved the moment when the chaotic sprinkle of dots resolved itself into a picture. That's what stories do. They connect the random dots of life into a picture. But it's all an illusion. Just try to connect the dots of life. You'll end up with a lunatic scribble.

A coherent life is one lived in such a way that you can clearly connect the dots between three things: who you are, what you believe, what you are doing.

That's what stories do. They connect the random dots of life into a picture. But it's all an illusion. Just try to connect the dots of life. You'll end up with a lunatic scribble.

Believing in things that aren’t real? Making something out of nothing? Connecting dots that don’t need or want to be connected? That’s what all the best writers do.

Maybe the existential risk is not machines taking over the world or reaching human-level intelligence, but rather the opposite where human beings think like idle machines - unable to connect the emerging dots of our complex, systemic world.

The charge that Trump colluded with the Russians to win the election, which he scoffed at, was, in the estimation of some of his friends, a perfect example of his inability to connect the dots.

Maybe everyone in the world was this inconsistent, this fragmented. All we could see of each other -- all we could see of ourselves -- was a ragged person-shaped outline, a game of connect-the-dots without enough dots.

The dots are now connecting. You feel alive! You know now that all is not lost. Now that you’ve cut the cord it is time give your heart a second chance at loving yourself. Silence your mind. Take a deep breath and close your eyes. As you open your eyes, look at your reflection in the mirror. Aren’t you beautiful, Queen? Embrace who you are. Smile, laugh, welcome the new you and say, “My world is just now beginning.

She was upset about something and all I wanted to do was get her naked and play connect the dots.

Steve Jobs: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

Tell me that you’ve spent a great deal of time gazing at stars, thinking that sometimes things look better farther apart. That constellations are beautiful only because we have the space to connect the dots.

Maybe the existential risk is not machines taking over the world, but rather the opposite, where humans start responding like idle machines - unable to connect the emerging dots of our UN-VICE world.

Yet on some level we do know the truth. We know that meat production is a messy business, but we choose not to know just how messy it is. We know that meat comes from an animal, but we choose not to connect the dots. And often, we eat animals and choose not to know we're even making a choice. Violent ideologies are structured so that it is not only possible, but inevitable, that we are aware of an unpleasant truth on one level while being oblivious to it on another. Common to all violent ideologies is this phenomenon of knowing without knowing.

I suppose all moms have an idea who they hope their daughters will be. Like a connect-the-dots picture where you think you know what shape it will become. But then it's the daughter who draws the lines, and she might connect the dots you didn't intend, making a whole different picture. So I've gotta trust the dots she's given me, and she's gotta trust me to draw the picture myself.

If you can't connect the Dots, Find the right dots first.

Creating is the act of paying attention to our experiences and connecting the dots so we can learn more about ourselves and the world around us.

There aren't any rules to running away from your problems. No checklist of things to cross off. No instructions. Eeny, meeny, pick a path and go. That's how my dad does it anyway because apparently there's no age limit to running away, either. He wakes up one day, packs the car with everything we own, and we hit the road. Watch all the pretty colors go by until he finds a town harmless enough to hide in. But his problems always find us. Sometimes quicker than others. Sometimes one month and sometimes six. There's no rule when it comes to that, either. Not about how long it takes for the problems to catch up with us. Just that they will—that much is a given. And then it's time to run again to a new town, a new home, and a new school for me. But if there aren't any rules, I wonder why it feels the same every time. Feels like I leave behind a little bit of who I was in each house we've left empty. Scattering pieces of me in towns all over the place. A trail of crumbs dotting the map from everywhere we've left to everywhere we go. And they don't make any pictures when I connect dots. They are random like the stars littering the sky at night.

When you start viewing creativity as a process of combination, and imagination as the ability to connect, stretch, and merge things in new ways, creative brilliance becomes less mystifying. A creative genius is just better at connecting the dots than others are.

I've known that forever. You've always loved me... you just didn't connect the dots until I pointed out the pattern.

You don't need a fancy degree to dream big and make it happen. It's all in your head , your heart , your hands.

Reflection is a good thing. It allows us to look back in time so we can connect the dots between specific memories to reveal the purpose and meaning behind synchronistic events.

Grandchildren are the dots that connect the lines from generation to generation.

There are solutions to the major problems of our time; some of them even simple. But they require a radical shift in our perceptions, our thinking, our values. And, indeed, we are now at the beginning of such a fundamental change of worldview in science and society, a change of paradigms as radical as the Copernican revolution. Unfortunately, this realization has not yet dawned on most of our political leaders, who are unable to “connect the dots,” to use a popular phrase.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe and that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego is supressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly myths of science, and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body, IN THE BODY, there are Niagaras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life. I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature. What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get them on the run you have the dominators sweating folks, because that means your getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind, and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set, and that's the idea; figuring out how to reset the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, INTELLIGENCE. This is what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards.” —

You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

It's funny how misery takes you straight back, connecting the dots through your life - the memories tumble out like sad photographs from a battered old album.

Ultimately, mastery is about connecting the dots of many fields.

If creativity is about connecting the dots, you need to have solid dots in the first place or you will have nothing to connect. So a grasp of the basics is necessary.

I detected instantly that she didn’t like me. It’s a fact of life that a girl can tell in a flash if another girl likes her. Feely says that there is a broken telephone connection between men and women, and we can never know which of us rang off. With a boy you never know whether he’s smitten or gagging, but with a girl you can tell in the first three seconds. Between girls there is a silent and unending flow of invisible signals, like the high frequency wireless messages between the shore and the ships at sea, and this secret flow of dots and dashes was signalling that Mary detesting me.

the human mind works in three elementary phases: saturate, incubate, and illuminate. Time allows us to saturate our mind with context, so we can incubate and spark the eureka moments of illumination that connect the dots, snap together patterns, and discover the options that allow us to find our paths.

I had this sudden awareness,' she continues, 'of how the moments of our lives go out of existence before we're conscious of having lived them. It's only a relatively few moments that we get to keep and carry with us for the rest of our lives. Those moments are our lives. Or maybe it's more like those moments are the dots in what we call our lives, or the lines we draw between them, connecting them into imaginary pictures of ourselves.

Sin can certainly be a cause of depression, but you must be careful about connecting the dots between the two. If you are being honest, you will always find sin in your life. Everyone does. That doesn’t mean that sin caused your depression. No sin is necessarily connected with sorrow of heart, for Jesus Christ our Lord once said, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death.” There was no sin in Him, and consequently none in His deep depression.3 The

I think about the Old Ones, that they have a past but no history. I think about the inevitability of death, and whether it’s not that very inevitability that inspires us to take photographs and make scrapbooks and tell stories. That that’s how we humans find our way to immortality. This is not a new thought; I’ve had such thoughts before. But I have a new thought now. That that’s how we find our way toward meaning. Meaning. If you’re going to die, you want to find meaning in life. You want to connect the dots.

We plan our lives in long, unbroken stretches that intersect our dreams the way highways connect the city dots on a road map. But in the end we learn that life is lived in the side roads, alleys, and detours. Alan Christoffersen’s diary

We write to find out what we didn’t know we knew. We write to know deeper and truer. We write to connect the dots: a whole new constellation.

Believe in the reader and they can connect the dots, if you succeed breathe life into the story

Most of the time, I feel like a perpetual smudge. My lines all curve. I tend to connect the wrong dots.

Signs. Senses. Synchronicities. Connect the dots. Follow the breadcrumbs to your destiny.

The picture you get at the end of a connect-the-dots activity really depends on which dots you decide to use. So try things and go through phases.

Steve Jobs once said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

Connecting the dots. That’s what Mom said stargazing is all about. It’s the same up there as it is down here, Jackie. You have to look for the things that connect us all. Find the ways our paths cross, our lives intersect, and our hearts collide.

When artists work well, they connect people to themselves, and they stitch people to one another, through this shared experience of discovering a connection that wasn’t visible before. Have you ever noticed that this looks like this? And with the same delight that we took as children in seeing a face in a cloud, grown-up artists draw the lines between the bigger dots of grown-up life: sex, love, vanity, violence, illness, death.

For almost forty years, I have tried to draw a shape that resembles me, but without success. Today, though, I can connect those disparate dots. I can see, in the constellation of fragments scattered over the page, a silhouette in which I recognize myself at last: I am the daughter, and the granddaughter, of survivors.

Martin Chalfie is a perfect example of the experience most people have of “connecting the dots” and solving a problem by being exposed to more ideas. Like Chalfie, we get a new piece of information that combines with other information we already have, and, presto, we make a discovery.

Be angry at the system, Raquel,” Belinda had told her that day, “and then see how you can fix it. I’ve been very hell-bent on showcasing emerging artists from underseen backgrounds, but I’ve not paid enough attention to connecting the dots. To correcting this lie that you were taught and that I was taught: that art started with some white guys in ancient Greece and was passed on and made better and better exclusively at the hands of white men.

Denial happens when you realize it shouldn’t be you, that even if your brain connected the dots, it isn’t yet your time. The lovely little memories of your life start to play on repeat in your head — the moments you should have done something but didn’t, the things you’ll never say, the things you’ll never do.

Franciscan friar Richard Rohr says that there are two kinds of time, at least according to the ancient Greeks. There is chronos—or chronological, ordered time—and then there is kairos. Kairos is subjective, qualitative. Deep Time is what Rohr calls it. A fullness, he says. The moments when the dots of our lives connect.

Observe the patterns of mistakes to see if they are products of weaknesses. Everyone has weaknesses and they are generally revealed in the patterns of mistakes they make. The fastest path to success starts with knowing what your weaknesses are and staring hard at them. Start by writing down your mistakes and connecting the dots between them. Then write down your “one big challenge,” the weakness that stands the most in the way of your getting what you want. Everyone has at least one big challenge. You may in fact have several, but don’t go beyond your “big three.” The first step to tackling these impediments is getting them out into the open.

I had this sudden awareness, she continues, of how the moments of our lives go out of existence before we're conscious of having lived them. It's only a relatively few moments that we get to keep and carry with us for the rest of our lives. Those moments are our lives. Or maybe it's more like those moments are the dots in what we call our lives, or the lines we draw between them, connecting them into imaginary pictures of ourselves. You know, like those mythical pictures of constellations traced between stars. I remember how when I was a kid, I actually expected to be able to look up and see Pagasus spread out against the night. And when I couldn't, it seemed like a trick had been played on me, like a fraud. I thought, hey, if this is all there is to it, then I could reconnect the stars in any shape I wanted. I could create the Ken and Barbie constellations… I realize we can never predict when those few special moments will occur, she says. How... there are certain people, not that many, who enter one's life with the power to make those moments happen. Maybe that's what falling in love means…the power to create for each other the moments by which we define ourselves.

Tess had been unaware of leaving anything behind, but to hear Jacomo tell it, he'd played a long, slow game of connect-the-dots, and each dot had been a kindness, farm chores, laughter, a story told. She'd passed through the world, and the world had remembered.

Meaning. If you're going to die, you want to find meaning in life. You want to connect the dots.

Sometimes what we need is right in front of us, we just have to connect the dots and embrace what we already know.

You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

Life is a gift... Enjoy the present

Commonalities that connect the dots that form a line that points to a serial killer.

That's how I remember things, anyway. I remember stories. I connect the dots and then out of that comes a story. And the dots that don't fit into the story just slide away, maybe. Like when you spot a constellation. You look up and you don't see all the stars. All the stars just look like the big fugging random mess that they are. But you want to see shapes; you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky. Hassan told me once you think like that, too - that you see connections everywhere - so you're a natural born storyteller, it turns out.

Being able to see the world in a fresh way is the essence of being an entrepreneur. You have an idea about the way the world ought to be. You have a theory about why and how you are going to connect the dots.

I level him with a stare and angrily state, “I am a short, round Cornish seamstress with a West Country accent that only gets thicker when I’m flustered. I’m obsessed with cats, and my freckles look like the Milky Way galaxy on a clear night.” “I love your freckles!” he barks, splaying one hand out on the counter and using his other hand to bop my nose. “They make me want to play connect the dots on your wee face.

There comes a point when you begin to connect to the dots, when the chosen paths begin to mean something, when the picture starts to reveal itself. It is probably not at all what you had envisioned, but somewhere deep inside, perhaps you always knew. The journey was there for a reason. Its was there for you and for the others that have traveled along with you. The strength and comfort that comes from that awareness is amazing and beyond words. Once experienced, it becomes the biggest part of you. So let it unfold. Let your life reveal its lessons. Follow your heart, as it will not lead you astray. Find your passion and let its energy run through you in ways you have never experienced. With that, your real life will begin.

We’re just suggesting the right credentials, so that readers take me and my story seriously, so that nobody refuses to pick up my work because of some outdated preconceptions about who can write what. And if anyone makes assumptions, or connects the dots the wrong way, doesn’t that say far more about them than me?

Cuz I look like Barbie.” I reply, knowing they can connect the dots. “Bad girls don’t like Barbie?” Michael asks, both his eyebrows rising. “No. Bad girls want to rip Barbie’s head off and flush it down the toilet,

I glance up at the stars, trying to piece together constellations in the night sky. But just like my life, they are nothing but a jumbled up map of dots that don’t connect, and they only leave more unexplained questions.

Did you think I was joking about killing Simon? Read it and weep, kids. Everyone in detention with Simon last week had an extraspecial reason for wanting him gone. Exhibit A: the posts above, which he was about to publish on About That. Now here’s your assignment: connect the dots. Is everybody in it together, or is somebody pulling strings? Who’s the puppet master and who’s the puppet? I’ll give you a hint to get you started: everyone’s lying. GO!

I’m not sure about all the particulars that led to this moment. Do I believe life is a series of dots to be connected…or that no one can outrun destiny…or that all roads lead to truth and coincidence is a lie to distract us? The reason I was in this place no longer mattered. The harsh reality stared me in the face and demanded an immediate decision. Walk away and blame it on my age. Or stay and try to help a woman who had slowly become my friend over the last few weeks.

RC blinked a couple more times and admired the freckles on either side of [Honey's] nose. He would have enjoyed connecting them dot-to-dot with a felt-tip pen. In his fantasy, he would discover the meaning of life spread across her cheekbones.

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust... in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life

If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. It is easier to know what’s ahead when there’s a well-rounded script inside your head. Companies say such tactics are important in all kinds of settings, including if you’re applying for a job or deciding whom to hire. The candidates who tell stories are the ones every firm wants. “We look for people who describe their experiences as some kind of a narrative,” Andy Billings, a vice president at the video game giant Electronic Arts, told me. “It’s a tip-off that someone has an instinct for connecting the dots and understanding how the world works at a deeper level. That’s who everyone tries to get.” III.

Sometimes I learn something about you because you tell me: your history, your family, your life before we met. But just as often my understanding comes from watching you, intuiting, and making associations. You present the facts, I connect the dots, and an image is formed. Your singularities are gradually revealed to me, openly or covertly, intentionally or not. Some places inside of you are easy to reach; others are encrypted and laborious to decode. Over time, I come to know your values, and your fault lines. By witnessing how you move in the world, I come to know how you connect: what excites you, what presses your buttons, and what you’re afraid of. I come to know your dreams and your nightmares. You grow on me. And all this, of course, happens in two directions.

You’re waiting for that magical day when someone makes the connection and recognizes who you really are. Maybe they’ll first catch the sparkle in your eye. Or perhaps they’ll marvel at your insights and the depth of your spirit. Someone who will help you connect the dots, believe in yourself, and make sense of it all. Someone who will understand you, approve of you, and unhesitatingly give you a leg up so that life can pluck your ready, ripened self from the branch of magnificence. Well, I’m here to tell you, your wait is over. That someone, is you.

Why say "yes"? "Yes" means opportunity. "Yes" makes the dots in your life appear. And if you're willing and open, you can connect these dots. You don't know where these dots are going to lead, and if you don't invest yourself fully, the dots won't connect. The lives you make with those dots always lead to interesting places. "No" closes doors. "Yes" kicks them wide open.....As long as you're able to say "yes", the opportunities keep coming, and with them, the adventures. Say "no" to fear and complacency. Keep saying "yes" and the journey will continue.

The picture you get a the end of a connect-the-dots activity really depends on which dots you decide to use. So try thing and go through phases. Put down lots of dots. Later, you can look back and pick any of those dots to create a picture of how you became who you are. And if you don't like the picture you end up with, you can always choose different dots, which just goes to show destiny isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Sometimes a problem extends so far from the source that one can no longer connect the dots and reach back to the root of the problem. When a problem shows up, it is definitely solvable, but when it is ignored long enough, its multiplication from different angles leaves no visible solution anymore.

When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. . . . Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

We had always talked easily and well, and as we carried our drinks away, I asked him what he thought there was in us that forced us to tell stories to ourselves about our own lives - to make up stories that had such an arbitrary resemblance to our actual living. Why did we pick certain dots and connect them and not others? Why did we find it so irresistible to make ourselves into tragic figures with tragic flaws which were responsible for our pain? Maybe unfortunate things just happened; maybe there was just bad luck. Why did it seem like our greatest failures were caused by perversions in our souls? 'Perhaps it's evolutionary,' he said. ' If we saw ourselves in realistic proportions - how tiny we are, and how little ability we have to avoid the suffering that's an inevitable part of life - maybe we would be too discouraged to survive.' 'Or maybe,' I said, 'the truth is so diffuse that our minds cannot even hold on to it.

Do you know the phrase watershed moment, buddy?” I nodded. You didn’t have to be an English teacher to know that one; you didn’t even have to be literate. It was one of those annoying linguistic shortcuts that show up on cable TV news shows, day in and day out. Others include connect the dots and at this point in time.

Some people rarely ever connect the dots in life. Others do connect them but end up being overwhelmed by the amount of information. Then there are those who connect the dots and are also able to make use of them. For the latter group, patterns become the real Guru which help them understand the relationship between different ideas and experiences.

Steve Jobs, He trusted that the dots would connect . He believed the reward is the journey. He followed his heart. He didn't settle for Okay. He did what he loved. And if he didn't love what he did, if didn't believe it was a great work, he redid it again and again. He tried to live each day as though it really matter, even before he had cancer.

But I do know that when you and I approach God for help, filled with our cares and distresses, our prayers are not confined to this calendar date, to this particular month and year. What may seem to be His silence and avoidance from where you sit today is already reverberating in future places. If not right here, if not right now, you can be sure His ability is taking visible, tangible shape somewhere, even if beyond the scope of your current sightline. You and I are living right this minute on a tiny dot of time within a vast sea of God-moments. And the ripple effect of today’s prayer, today’s faith—today’s now—spirals out in all directions for all eternity, bumping something here, affecting something there, all under God’s watchful eye and wisdom. Each time we turn to Him, each time we trust, each time we bring our all to the surpassing greatness of His all, we find ourselves instantly connected to every future time zone where His ability lives. We link up across generations where He is already working, present-tense, to make His glory known.

I simply will never stop learning because I don´t want to tie myself just to one way of making a living.

The more we observe patterns, the more we connect the dots and make sense out of them, the more we learn.

Dipsy do and Dipsy be. How many dots does Dipsy need to connect the dots, one, two, three.

In my head, I knew we were going to have sex. But somehow, I didn’t connect the dots that I’d have to be naked for it.

Performance Management is a holistic management discipline which needs to connect many relevant dots to involve development, enablement, and enhancement.

How many dots will you connect to building your dream picture, let you inner guidance system flow.

Time gives our lives numerous opportunities demarcated into moments that allow us to connect the dots while looking back.

Yet the doctors do not seem to have connected the dots,

The truth is, there is a plan. A bigger plan. Every experience in your life – whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – has made you what you are.

We should use discernment to connect dots, avoid traps, and make wise judgments without becoming too judgmental, suspicious, and faultfinders.

asking the right question is more important than having the right answer.

A cover letter can connect the dots between where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re trying to go.

Our mission in life is not to reach sales targets. The purpose of life is to be happy.

I am a dreamer. I do a lot of things which people consider illogical but for me there is a very clear logic to what I do and why I do. I live by my convictions.” The

Claim the keys to your kingdom and rule over your dreams.

An effective Board can connect all the right dots well.

Those who know how to make connections, to connect the dots, ideas and people will be those who know how to surf on the wave of change that is ahead.

Just because you don’t see the point, doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

When you're seven," said Hannah, "it feels like life's just made up of moments. Pieces of the picture with nothing to connect them. It's not until later you can join the dots.

Policemen are often confronted with situations which baffle them at first. A certain crime scene may seem meaningless, but they have to derive some meaning out of it. They have to connect the dots, find the links, delve into its history, look for evidence, come up with a zillion theories and arrive at truth. The thing is, truth is always stranger than fiction.

My spirituality is based on things that I cannot explain but nonetheless believe. Americans tend to be hyperrational: everything must fit into the right box, and all of the dots must connect. When I moved to the US, it was much harder for me to express myself spiritually and to capture the energy that transcends the rational. People here live according to what they can prove and explain. If they can’t explain something, they deem it unacceptable and unbelievable. However, rationality has its limits; not everything can be explained on paper. Just look into the sky on a clear night. Where does the universe begin? Where does it end? Are we the only form of life in it? Is there life after death? Simple questions without easy answers.

I remember stories. I connect the dots and then out of that comes a story. And the dots that don't fit into the story just slide away, maybe. Like when you spot a constellation. You look up and you don't want to see all the stars. All the stars just look like the big...mess that they are. But you want to see shapes; you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky.

I think I look like a leopard,” she remarked, pulling back to inspect her spotted arms and legs. Then that mischievous smile blossomed over her gorgeous lips. “Want to play connect the dots?

Getting treed by a chihuahua is a metaphor for making decisions without context. Context is the reality of the situation around us. Without context, our minds have a tendency to take shortcuts and recognize patterns that aren’t really there; we connect the dots without collecting the dots first. Overreacting, underreacting, and failing to do anything at all are all symptoms of “getting treed.

As Steve Jobs said in his now legendary commencement address at Stanford, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” There

He drew a bunch of dots on the board and connected some of them, like constellations. Were Ivan and I among the connected ones—the subset of people who knew each other? What was it to know each other?

Your Creative Autobiography 1. What is the first creative moment you remember? 2. Was anyone there to witness or appreciate it? 3. What is the best idea you’ve ever had? 4. What made it great in your mind? 5. What is the dumbest idea? 6. What made it stupid? 7. Can you connect the dots that led you to this idea? 8. What is your creative ambition? 9. What are the obstacles to this ambition? 10. What are the vital steps to achieving this ambition? 11. How do you begin your day? 12. What are your habits? What patterns do you repeat? 13. Describe your first successful creative act. 14. Describe your second successful creative act. 15. Compare them. 16. What are your attitudes toward: money, power, praise, rivals, work, play? 17. Which artists do you admire most? 18. Why are they your role models? 19. What do you and your role models have in common? 20. Does anyone in your life regularly inspire you? 21. Who is your muse? 22. Define muse. 23. When confronted with superior intelligence or talent, how do you respond? 24. When faced with stupidity, hostility, intransigence, laziness, or indifference in others, how do you respond? 25. When faced with impending success or the threat of failure, how do you respond? 26. When you work, do you love the process or the result? 27. At what moments do you feel your reach exceeds your grasp? 28. What is your ideal creative activity? 29. What is your greatest fear? 30. What is the likelihood of either of the answers to the previous two questions happening? 31. Which of your answers would you most like to change? 32. What is your idea of mastery? 33. What is your greatest dream?

We’re doing everything we can. When the dots connect, I’m left with one terrible, frightening, and at the same time relieving explanation: Patrick isn’t working for the government. He’s working against it.

though. Before you can connect dots, you need to have dots to connect. The more material you’re exposed to in the world, the more grist you’ll have for your imagination mill. Tesla fully immersed himself in the world of electricity. He read hundreds of books. He conducted thousands of experiments and took copious notes. The more varied your knowledge and experiences are, the more likely you are to be able to create

That’s how I remember things, anyway. I remember stories. I connect the dots and then out of that comes a story. And the dots that don’t fit into the story just slide away, maybe. Like when you spot a constellation. You look up and you don’t see all the stars. All the stars just look like the big fugging random mess that they are. But you want to see shapes; you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky.

The covering up of Till’s murder was not something that was perpetrated by a few bad apples. It couldn’t have been. The erasure was a collective effort, one that continues to this day. This isn’t comfortable history to face. The more I looked at the story of the barn and came to understand the forces that moved everyone involved into the Mississippi Delta in 1955, the more I understood that the tragedy of humankind isn’t that sometimes a few depraved individuals do what the rest of us could never do. It’s that the rest of us hide those hateful things from view, never learning the lesson that hate grows stronger and more resistant when it’s pushed underground. There lies the true horror of Emmett Till’s murder and the undeserved gift of his martyrdom. Empathy only lives at the intersection of facts and imagination, and once you know his story, you can’t unknow it. Once you connect all the dots, there’s almost nowhere they don’t lead. Which is why so many have fought literally and figuratively for so long to keep the reality from view.

Wished I could be in your dreams, Floating by, like moonlit streams. Wished I could be in your thoughts, Twisting tales, connecting dots. Wished I could be in your song, In every note, where I belong. Wished I could be in your dance, In every step, in every glance. Wished I could be the whispering breeze, Caressing you with such gentle ease. But most of all, beyond everything above, I wish to remain in your heart.

If we wake up some morning and find some American city in radioactive ruins, will we connect the dots and see this as a consequence of voting to elect an unknown and untried man, for the sake of racial symbolism?

A common critique of the intelligence failure on 9/11 was that the relevant agencies possessed a lot of facts—a lot of data points—that might have pointed to an imminent attack, but no one could “connect the dots.

Once upon a time, mystery fans had to solve puzzles on their own; now, you not only didn’t need to be the one to solve it, you didn’t even need to be hanging around on the website where someone else had solved it. An Ana Lucia flashback episode in the second season showed Jack’s father, Christian, visiting a blonde Australian woman. Not long after it aired, I saw someone on the Television Without Pity message boards passing along a theory they had read on a different site suggesting that this woman was Claire’s mother, that Christian was her father, and that Jack and Claire were unwitting half-siblings. I hadn’t connected those dots myself, but the theory immediately made sense to me. When I interviewed Cuse that summer, he mentioned Christian Shephard, and I said, “And he’s Claire’s father, too, right?” Cuse looked like he was about to have a heart attack.

The logo represents the vision of Superior University to provide quality education to the youth of Pakistan. The outer circle represents a controlled environment that provides protection, security and opens 360° solution to their educational needs. The central circle represents a sun or sun rays that trickles through the faculty and is passed on to the students. Digitalization and Innovation is reflected through connecting the dots

To find the kinds of people with the type of on-the-ground knowledge that can enable us to understand and connect the dots, we have to imagine how to seek out and listen to them. It’s very rarely the self-styled expert or the academician, though both can make positive contributions to our knowledge base. Rather, it’s the person who has walked the specific ground, lived the specific lifestyle, and possesses a specific psychosocial mind-set whom we need.

The most perplexing yet marvellous phenomena to me so far, is that connecting the dots and seeing patterns of one's life only happens backward and time only happens forward. You can't catch a pattern from the future and you can't catch time from the past. Only by the memories from the past a one tackles the complexity of the present and uncertainty of the future and while everything changes, the mechanism is always the same, and this itself is a pattern.

What doesn’t come from your heart will never enter someone else’s heart. It takes caring to ignite caring; it takes empathy to ignite empathy. You also can’t have an effective column without some “take” on the biggest forces shaping the world in which we live and how to influence them. Your view of the Machine can never be perfect or immutable. It always has to be a work in progress that you are building and rebuilding as you get new information and the world changes. But it is very difficult to persuade people to do something if you can’t connect the dots for them in a convincing way—why this action will produce this result, because this is how the gears and pulleys of the Machine work.

The doctor had installed a portal that connected Emily’s store to her house, allowing her to bypass her commute. The portal was sage green and had three golden dots painted on the side: Emily studied the dots. “Is that an upside-down ‘therefore’ symbol?” “When the dots are placed this way, they mean ‘because.’ I know my house is closer to town than yours. If you do ever decide to marry me,” Daedalus said, “I did not wish convenience to be a factor in your decision.

We just need more dots to connect. You should develop broad personal interests in a variety of subjects. What you present to the world should be narrow and show deep focus. In other words, generalize internally, and specialize externally.

The brain is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. The first process I call patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. The second process I call agenticity: the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency. We can’t help it. Our brains evolved to connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen. These meaningful patterns become beliefs, and these beliefs shape our understanding of reality. Once beliefs are formed, the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which adds an emotional boost of further confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation.

It fascinates me that when we lose one of our five senses, the remaining four strengthen and rally to make sense of the world we live in. Even by closing our eyes for a moment, we find ourselves paying closer attention to the sounds around us. Perhaps this is why music can resonate so deeply within us; somehow our isolated senses allow our brains the space and perspective to connect these really beautiful dots of our own hearts and souls. I wonder if the act of giving our other senses a break ca

The challenge isn’t to find better tools to lead a more productive life, it’s learning to be mindful of the tools that have already taken root. Mindfulness while using technology is important, and therefore the future belongs to those who can tame their distractions.

It has taken the science some time to catch up and connect the dots, but, in 2012, one pathbreaking study derived one third of all existential threats to animal species straight from the sale of goods like coffee, beef, tea, sugar and palm oil to countries of the North.

The horror movies made in the ’70s didn’t have rules and often lacked the reassuring backstory that explained the evil away or turned it into a postmodern meta-joke. Why did the killer stalk the sorority girls in Black Christmas? Why was Regan possessed in The Exorcist? Why was the shark cruising around Amity? Where did Carrie White’s powers come from? There were no answers, just as there were no concrete connect-the-dot justifications of daily life’s randomness: shit happens, deal with it, stop whining, take your medicine, grow the fuck up.

Have you ever thought about doing something then forgot all about it and it never got done? Well, when many folks get to the end of their lives they will say, if only I would have lived a more joyful life but I forgot the reason I was put on earth... Don't become one of them.

Charlie Chaplin told the same joke 3 times I/laughter 2/giggle 3/silence Then he told these beautiful lines; ”when you cannot laugh at the same joke again and again…then why do you cry again and again on the same worry” Enjoy each moment, as time passes in the blink of an eye!

We fool ourselves about our worldview, our ideology, our religion, the evidence of our senses, and the interpretation of the world that we use to construct our beliefs. All the evidence we notice and remember confirms our views. Everything else is ignored or forgotten—or, better, dismissed based on flaws in the analysis. A reader of mine, Sam Thomsen, said it very well: The Universe is full of dots. Connect the right ones and you can draw anything. The important question is not whether the dots you picked are really there, but why you chose to ignore all the others.

Many of us begin this art with little to no understanding of what we are getting ourselves into. Then, maybe a year or a black belt later, we realize this odyssey we have embarked upon and rest happily in knowing we have chosen a noble struggle. I think we owe most of our successes to our initial ignorance. When we begin, we cannot see the obstacles ahead, and so we march on optimistically. In hindsight, when we look back and connect the dots, we see just how green we were at the start, and it was only our ignorance that upheld us from the crushing despair of the task at hand.

It’s that particular logic of hers that says gravity is to blame if someone pushes you down a flight of stairs, that all trees were planted so that she could take a piss behind them, and that all roads, no matter how meandering and long, have one connecting dot, the same knot – her. Rome is a joke.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

There was a school here now, in Concourse C. Like educated children everywhere, the children in the airport school memorized abstractions: the airplanes outside once flew through the air. You could use an airplane to travel to the other side of the world, but—the schoolteacher was a man who’d had frequent-flyer status on two airlines—when you were on an airplane you had to turn off your electronic devices before takeoff and landing, devices such as the tiny flat machines that played music and the larger machines that opened up like books and had screens that hadn’t always been dark, the insides brimming with circuitry, and these machines were the portals into a worldwide network. Satellites beamed information down to Earth. Goods traveled in ships and airplanes across the world. There was no place on earth that was too far away to get to. They were told about the Internet, how it was everywhere and connected everything, how it was us. They were shown maps and globes, the lines of the borders that the Internet had transcended. This is the yellow mass of land in the shape of a mitten; this pin here on the wall is Severn City. That was Chicago. That was Detroit. The children understood dots on maps—here—but even the teenagers were confused by the lines. There had been countries, and borders. It was hard to explain.

God clues us in to the fact that, "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." In short, God is not logical. This is not to say that he is illogical, only that he is not limited by logic. Simplified, "logic" is connecting the dots. We identify the dots we consider relevant, then connect them into lines and patterns. God, on the other hand, may see that, beneath one of the dots is a stack of a trillion more dots, each of which may be combined with the others. Little wonder that our ways and meanings frequently fail to match God's ways and meanings. Great wonder that, when they don't, we tend to fault him.

There are a lot of dots out there. If you automatically connect all the stray facts you hear to all the available dots, the next thing you know, the chaotic vagaries of the world will have you believing that the United Nations operates a fleet of black helicopters based in Wyoming and that Osama bin Laden is living secretly in the Lincoln Bedroom.

I believe that every blessing, every breakthrough, every miracle traces back to the prayers that were prayed by you or for you. One of the greatest moments in eternity will be the day God peels back the space-time curtain and unveils His sovereignty by connecting the divine dots between our prayers and His answers. That infinite web of prayer crisscrosses every nation, every generation. And when God finally reveals His strange and mysterious ways, it will drop us to our knees in worship. We will thank Him for the prayers He did answer. We’ll also thank Him for the prayers He didn’t answer because we’ll finally understand why. And we’ll thank Him for the answered prayers we weren’t even aware of.

I connect the dots and then out of that comes a story. And the dots that don’t fit into the story just slide away, maybe. Like when you spot a constellation. You look up and you don’t see all the stars. All the stars just look like the big fugging random mess that they are. But you want to see shapes, you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky.

Why did the killer stalk the sorority girls in Black Christmas? Why was Regan possessed in The Exorcist? Why was the shark cruising around Amity? Where did Carrie White’s powers come from? There were no answers, just as there were no concrete connect-the-dot justifications of daily life’s randomness: shit happens, deal with it, stop whining, take your medicine, grow the fuck up.

Recently, as I was teaching this concept, a CFO—who deals with numbers all the time—came up to me and said, “This is fascinating! I’ve always seen trust as a nice thing to have, but I never, ever, thought of it in terms of its impact on economics and speed. Now that you’ve pointed it out, I can see it everywhere I turn. “For example, we have one supplier in whom we have complete trust. Everything happens fast with this group, and the relationship hardly costs us anything to maintain. But with another supplier, we have very little trust. It takes forever to get anything done, and it costs us a lot of time and effort to support the relationship. And that’s costing us money—too much money!” This CFO was amazed when everything suddenly fell into place in his mind. Even though he was a “numbers” guy, he had not connected the dots with regard to trust. Once he saw it, everything suddenly made sense. He could immediately see how trust was affecting everything in the organization, and how robust and powerful the idea of the relationship between trust, speed, and cost was for analyzing what was happening in his business and for taking steps to significantly increase profitable growth.

I believe everything in our life, every person in our life, every relationship, everything is there for a reason. And when you really pay attention, there are certain little clues we get, it’s so crystal clear what the next step is. It’s just this puzzle and everything’s in its right place, and as we grow we take the next step, the dots get connected and we eventually become what we’re supposed to be.

Be honest with yourself. You were at your lowest and broken down. You were unsure and lost hope. You were hiding your fears until you showed them on your sleeve. You felt like everything and everyone was the hammer and you were the nail as they were beating down on you, and it was never-ending. Their empty threats had you scared and you were always running because your weakness was exposed. You were their prey. You didn’t know who to believe because of their mixed signals. You might not see it now, but you are stronger than you can ever imagine. You cannot become comfortable in your pain. You have to let the pain that you feel turn you into a rose without thorns. There are sixteen pieces on the chessboard. The king is the most important piece, but the difference is that the queen is the most powerful piece! You are a queen, you can maneuver around your opponents; they do not have the power over your life, your mind or soul. You might think you’ve been a prisoner, but that is your past’. Look in the now and work your way to how you want your future to be. Exercise your thoughts into a pattern of letting go, and think positively about more of what you want than what you do not want. Queen! You are a queen! As a matter of fact, you are the queen! Act as if you know it! You are powerful, determined, strong, and you can make the biggest and most extravagant move and put it into action. Lights, camera, strike a pose and own it! It is yours to own! Yes, you loved and loved so much. You also lost as well, but you lost hurt, pain, agony, and confusion. You’ve lost interest in wanting to know answers to unanswered questions. You’ve lost the willingness to give a shit about what others think. You’ve surrendered to being fine, that you cannot change the things you have no control over. You’ve lost a lot, but you’ve gained closure. You are now balanced, centered, focused, and filled with peace surrounding you in your heart, mind, body, and soul. Your pride was hurt, but you would rather walk alone and be more willing to give and learn more about the queen you are. You lost yourself in the process, but the more you learn about the new you, the more you will be so much in love with yourself. The more you learn about the new you, the more you will know your worth. The more you learn about the new you, the happier you are going to be, and this time around you will be smiling inside and out! The dots are now connecting. You feel alive! You know now that all is not lost. Now that you’ve cut the cord it is time to give your heart a second chance at loving yourself. Silence your mind. Take a deep breath and close your eyes. As you open your eyes, look at your reflection in the mirror. Aren’t you beautiful, Queen? Embrace who you are. Smile, laugh, welcome the new you and say, “My world is just now beginning.

That's how I remember things, anyway. I remember stories. I connect the dots and then out of that comes a story. And the dots that don't fit into the story just slide away, maybe. Like when you spot a constellation. You look up and you don't see all the stars. All the stars just look like the big fugging random mess that they are. But you want to see the shapes; you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something. Your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart. Even if it leads you off the well-worn path. And that will make all the difference.

Sir Paul McCartney once claimed that if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian. He believed that if we knew the truth about meat production, we'd be unable to continue eating animals. Yet on some level we do know the truth. We know that meat production is a messy business, but we choose not to know just how messy it is. We know that meat comes from an animal, but we choose not to connect the dots.

Suppose a surgeon and an anesthesiologist could not communicate with each other except through a hospital administrator about a patient on an operating table, he said. “Instead of [an] exchange of information [among] people who are attempting to accomplish a result . . . , we have made it virtually impossible.” Olson went on, “In order to connect the dots someone has got to have knowledge of those various different dots.

In Parenting from the Inside Out (Siegel and Hartzell 2004), Daniel Siegel writes about the need for parents to make sense of their own early life experiences and to create healthy and coherent personal narratives so they can provide effective modeling and attuned communication and raise children who will thrive. Parents who learn how to connect the dots of their own journey through life have a heightened chance of offering loving and skillful discipline to their children.

I have been to the Alpine countries of Austria and Ardamia before, but never to this corner of the range, and while the journey to St. Liesl, which perches high above sea level, was not a comfortable one, it took my breath away. The path wound up a mountainside still dotted with the last of the summer flowers, snowbells and cheery buttercups. Mountains cluttered every horizon, many crowned in an eternal snow. Below us was the town of Leoburg with its railroad, its neat stone-and-timber buildings, its sharp and commanding steeple, but the higher we went, the more all this was dwarfed by the wildness surrounding it, the railroad a thin line of stitches connecting us to the world we knew. And then we rounded a bend in the path, and we could no longer see the town at all. I understand now why the folklore of the Alps is so rich--- the many folds and crevices in the mountainsides could hide any number of faerie doors opening onto dozens of stories.

All I have is the will to remember. Time revoked/fever dreams — I wake up reaching, afraid I’ll forget. Pictures keep the woman young. L.A., fall 1958. Newsprint: link the dots. Names, events — so brutal they beg to be connected. Years down — the story stays dispersed. The names are dead or too guilty to tell. I’m old, afraid I’ll forget: I killed innocent men. I betrayed sacred oaths. I reaped profit from horror. Fever — that time burning. I want to go with the music — spin, fall with it.

Israeli intelligence, on the other hand, relied mostly on human resources—had countless spies in mosques, Islamic organizations, and leadership roles; and had no problem recruiting even the most dangerous terrorists. They knew they had to have eyes and ears on the inside, along with minds that understood motives and emotions and could connect the dots. America understood neither Islamic culture nor its ideology. That, combined with open borders and lax security made it a much softer target than Israel.

Yet another problem with the ‘threat response’ theory is that it has difficulty explaining why damage to the amygdala impairs not just people’s ability to respond appropriately to fearful expressions but their ability to even identify them – to come up with a name for what the expresser is feeling. When S.M. sees a fearful face, it isn’t as though she knows what to call it but fails to show appropriate signs of fearful avoidance or vigilance in response. It’s that she sees it and is mystified by its very meaning, like a colour-blind person searching for a number in a featureless array of brown dots.

What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? What advice should they ignore? [My advice:] Pursue every project, idea, or industry that genuinely lights you up, regardless of how unrelated each idea is, or how unrealistic a long-term career in that field might now seem. You’ll connect the dots later. Work your fucking ass off and develop a reputation for going above and beyond in all situations. Do whatever it takes to earn enough money, so that you can go all in on experiences or learning opportunities that put you in close proximity to people you admire, because proximity is power. Show up in every moment like you’re meant to be there, because your energy precedes anything you could possibly say. Ignore the advice to specialize in one thing, unless you’re certain that’s how you want to roll. Ignore giving a shit about what other people think about your career choices or what you do for a living—especially if what you do for a living funds your career choices. Ignore the impulse to dial down your enthusiasm for fear it’ll be perceived as unprofessional. And especially for women, ignore societal and familial pressures to get married and have kids.

Groups have powerful self-reinforcing mechanisms at work. These can lead to group polarization—a tendency for members of the group to end up in a more extreme position than they started in because they have heard the views repeated frequently. At the extreme limit of group behavior is groupthink. This occurs when a group makes faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of “mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment.” The original work was conducted with reference to the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. However, it rears its head again and again, whether it is in connection with the Challenger space shuttle disaster or the CIA intelligence failure over the WMD of Saddam Hussein. Groupthink tends to have eight symptoms: 1 . An illusion of invulnerability. This creates excessive optimism that encourages taking extreme risks. [...] 2. Collective rationalization. Members of the group discount warnings and do not reconsider their assumptions. [...] 3. Belief in inherent morality. Members believe in the rightness of their cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions. 4. Stereotyped views of out-groups. Negative views of “enemy” make effective responses to conflict seem unnecessary. Remember how those who wouldn't go along with the dot-com bubble were dismissed as simply not getting it. 5. Direct pressure on dissenters. Members are under pressure not to express arguments against any of the group’s views. 6. Self-censorship. Doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus are not expressed. 7. Illusion of unanimity. The majority view and judgments are assumed to be unanimous. 8. "Mind guards" are appointed. Members protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group's cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions. This is confirmatory bias writ large.

Too seldom within the environmental movement are connections made between the guns that take Black lives on the streets of cities such as Ferguson and Ottawa and the rising seas and devastating droughts destroying the homelands of Black and brown people around the world. Rarely are the dots connected between the powerful men who think they have the right to use and abuse women's bodies and the widespread notion that humans have the right to do the same thing to the earth. So many crises we are facing are symptoms of the same underlying sickness: a dominance-based logic that treats so many people, and the earth itself, as disposable.

But I also saw shiny little dots of red and black. Lady beetles, or lady bugs, which can eat as many as 5,000 aphids in a lifetime, came to feast on the prairie project’s plenty. Some studies suggest that the milkweed sends a chemical message on the breeze to request the tiny predators’ assistance. Nymph and adult lady beetles are among the few predators who are unbothered by the fact that the aphids engorge themselves on milkweed’s noxious gluey sap. I can’t stop thinking about what it means to build a sustainable, mutually supportive community, and I can’t stop thinking about who I want beside me as I undertake this project of connection.

What I hadn’t realized was that, above all else, Favs was a prodigy. Speechwriters, even great ones, tend to lead either from the head or heart. I was a head-first writer, connecting logical dots and only later adding emotions. Heart-first people went the other way around. Favs was the only true switch-hitter I ever met. His writing was both lyrical and well organized, arcing between timeless values and everyday concerns with astounding ease and grace. Perhaps because he possessed innate talent, Favs tended to separate people into two categories: those who had it and those who did not. I was lucky enough to be lumped into the haves. From the day I arrived he acted as if, all evidence to the contrary, his team benefited from having me around. “So, is it amazing?” friends would ask. Of course it was amazing. Sometimes Kathy, Valerie’s assistant, would explain that we needed to reschedule a meeting because Valerie had been called into the Oval. She said this casually, as though her boss had been put on hold with the cable company and not summoned by the leader of the free world. Other times I would watch Favs and the POTUS speechwriters spitball lines for a set of remarks. A few days later, I would see those exact same lines on the front page of the New York Times. It was unbelievable. I felt like Cinderella at the ball.

Wit,” I tried again, and this time, I put my hand on his knee and squeezed it. “Wit!” Something flashed in his eyes when he turned and saw the terror on my face, and before I could count to ten, he’d eased on the brakes, pulled onto the side of the road, and put the Jeep in park. “Shit, shit, shit,” I heard him mutter as he hopped out of the car and came around to my side to pop open my door. “I’m sorry.” He looked up at me, high off the ground in the passenger seat. “I’m an asshole. I’m sorry.” Don’t cry, I told myself. Don’t cry. But it had taken him less than ten seconds. It had taken him less than ten seconds to connect the dots, while Ben had never connected them.

Youth. Murder (Biko). Slavery. Freedom. We are all creatures of ignorance at the end of the day. The natural order of the hierarchy of life states that we are creatures. Creatures of habit whether it is normal (following the status quo and all of that jazz). Creatures of marching orders and almost sanitary routine. Creatures of the abnormal. Our leaders are coldly obliterating the past. It is impossible to destroy nations, tribes, individuals without their permission. Many lessons learned from the past come to life like the connect the dots game of a child in a museum. We are swift to forget history. Bury the past like yesterday’s newspaper, our infirm and elderly in nursing homes.

My observation (and experience, for that matter) indicates that humans have a propensity for choosing paths that do not lead in the direction they want to go. For much of our decision making, we lean hard into our intentions and pay very little attention to the direction of the path we’ve chosen. I see it all the time. Even with very smart people. It breaks my heart how many people I speak with who don’t connect the dots between the choices they make and the outcomes they experience. They’ve come to believe the popular notion that as long as their intentions are good, as long as their hearts are in the right place (whatever that means), as long as they do their best and try their hardest, it doesn’t really matter which path they take. They believe somehow they will end up in a good place. But life doesn’t work that way.

Here is a little boy,” said Bingo, indicating me to the strange lady, “who wets his bed every night. Do you know what I am going to do if you wet your bed again?” she added, turning to me. “I am going to get the Sixth Form to beat you.” The strange lady put on an air of being inexpressibly shocked, and exclaimed “I-should-think-so!” And here occurred one of those wild, almost lunatic misunderstandings which are part of the daily experience of childhood. The Sixth Form was a group of older boys who were selected as having “character” and were empowered to beat smaller boys. I had not yet learned of their existence, and I mis-heard the phrase “the Sixth Form” as “Mrs. Form.” I took it as referring to the strange lady—I thought, that is, that her name was Mrs. Form. It was an improbable name, but a child has 110 judgement in such matters. I imagined, therefore, that it was she who was to be deputed to beat me. It did Dot strike me as strange that this job should be turned over to a casual visitor in no way connected with the school. I merely assumed that “Mrs. Form” was a stern disciplinarian who enjoyed beating people (somehow her appearance seemed to bear this out) and I had an immediate terrifying vision of her arriving for the occasion in full riding kit and armed with a hunting whip. To this day I can feel myself almost swooning with shame as I stood, a very small, round-faced boy in short corduroy knickers, before the two women. I could not speak. I felt that I should die if “Mrs. Form” were to beat me. But my dominant feeling was not fear or even resentment: it was simply shame because one more person, and that a woman, had been told of my disgusting offence.

The Southern Cross gets the award for the greatest hype among all eighty-eight constellations. By listening to Southern Hemisphere people talk about this constellation, and by listening to songs written about it, and by noticing it on the national flags of Australia, New Zealand, Western Samoa, and Papua New Guinea, you would think we in the North were somehow deprived. Nope. Firstly, one needn’t travel to the Southern Hemisphere to see the Southern Cross. It’s plainly visible (although low in the sky) from as far north as Miami, Florida. This diminutive constellation is the smallest in the sky—your fist at arm’s length would eclipse it completely. Its shape isn’t very interesting either. If you were to draw a rectangle using a connect-the-dots method you would use four stars. And if you were to draw a cross you would presumably include a fifth star in the middle to indicate the cross-point of the two beams. But the Southern Cross is composed of only four stars, which more accurately resemble a kite or a crooked box. The constellation lore of Western cultures owes its origin and richness to centuries of Babylonian, Chaldean, Greek, and Roman imaginations. Remember, these are the same imaginations that gave rise to the endless dysfunctional social lives of the gods and goddesses. Of course, these were all Northern Hemisphere civilizations, which means the constellations of the southern sky (many of which were named only within the last 250 years) are mythologically impoverished. In the North we have the Northern Cross, which is composed of all five stars that a cross deserves. It forms a subset of the larger constellation Cygnus the swan, which is flying across the sky along the Milky Way. Cygnus is nearly twelve times larger than the Southern Cross.

As a society we are only now getting close to where Dogen was eight hundred years ago. We are watching all our most basic assumptions about life, the universe, and everything come undone, just like Dogen saw his world fall apart when his parents died. Religions don’t seem to mean much anymore, except maybe to small groups of fanatics. You can hardly get a full-time job, and even if you do, there’s no stability. A college degree means very little. The Internet has leveled things so much that the opinions of the greatest scientists in the world about global climate change are presented as being equal to those of some dude who read part of the Bible and took it literally. The news industry has collapsed so that it’s hard to tell a fake headline from a real one. Money isn’t money anymore; it’s numbers stored in computers. Everything is changing so rapidly that none of us can hope to keep up. All this uncertainty has a lot of us scrambling for something certain to hang on to. But if you think I’m gonna tell you that Dogen provides us with that certainty, think again. He actually gives us something far more useful. Dogen gives us a way to be okay with uncertainty. This isn’t just something Buddhists need; it’s something we all need. We humans can be certainty junkies. We’ll believe in the most ridiculous nonsense to avoid the suffering that comes from not knowing something. It’s like part of our brain is dedicated to compulsive dot-connecting. I think we’re wired to want to be certain. You have to know if that’s a rope or a snake, if the guy with the chains all over his chest is a gangster or a fan of bad seventies movies. Being certain means being safe. The downfall is that we humans think about a lot of stuff that’s not actually real. We crave certainty in areas where there can never be any. That’s when we start in with believing the crazy stuff. Dogen is interesting because he tries to cut right to the heart of this. He gets into what is real and what is not. Probably the main reason he’s so difficult to read is that Dogen is trying to say things that can’t actually be said. So he has to bend language to the point where it almost breaks. He’s often using language itself to show the limitations of language. Even the very first readers of his writings must have found them difficult. Dogen understood both that words always ultimately fail to describe reality and that we human beings must rely on words anyway. So he tried to use words to write about that which is beyond words. This isn’t really a discrepancy. You use words, but you remain aware of their limitations. My teacher used to say, “People like explanations.” We do. They’re comforting. When the explanation is reasonably correct, it’s useful.

It didn't matter how much he liked being Neil Josten. He'd stayed here too long as it was. Neil should be used to this by now. He'd spent the last eight years on the run, spinning lie after lie to leave a twisted trail behind him. Twenty-two names stood between him and the truth, and he knew what would happen if anyone finally connected the dots. Signing with a college team meant more than standing still. It meant he'd be stepping into a spotlight. [...] The math was simple, but that didn't make this any easier. That contract was a one-way ticket to a future, something Neil could never have, and he wanted it so badly he ached. For a blinding moment he hated himself for ever trying out for Millport's team. He'd known better than to step on a court. [...] But what else was he supposed to do? [...] This was the only thing he had left that was real. Now that he'd had a taste of it again, he didn't know how to walk away from it.

There followed a three-year spectacle during which [Senator Joseph] McCarthy captured enormous media attention by prophesying the imminent ruin of America and by making false charges that he then denied raising—only to invent new ones. He claimed to have identified subversives in the State Department, the army, think tanks, universities, labor unions, the press, and Hollywood. He cast doubt on the patriotism of all who criticized him, including fellow senators. McCarthy was profoundly careless about his sources of information and far too glib when connecting dots that had no logical link. In his view, you were guilty if you were or ever had been a Communist, had attended a gathering where a supposed Communist sympathizer was present, had read a book authored by someone soft on Communism, or subscribed to a magazine with liberal ideas. McCarthy, who was nicknamed Tailgunner Joe, though he had never been a tail gunner, was also fond of superlatives. By the middle of 1951, he was warning the Senate of “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” McCarthy would neither have become a sensation, nor ruined the careers of so many innocent people, had he not received support from some of the nation’s leading newspapers and financing from right-wingers with deep pockets. He would have been exposed much sooner had his wild accusations not been met with silence by many mainstream political leaders from both parties who were uncomfortable with his bullying tactics but lacked the courage to call his bluff. By the time he self-destructed, a small number of people working in government had indeed been identified as security risks, but none because of the Wisconsin senator’s scattershot investigations. McCarthy fooled as many as he did because a lot of people shared his anxieties, liked his vituperative style, and enjoyed watching the powerful squirm. Whether his allegations were greeted with resignation or indignation didn’t matter so much as the fact that they were reported on and repeated. The more inflammatory the charge, the more coverage it received. Even skeptics subscribed to the idea that, though McCarthy might be exaggerating, there had to be some fire beneath the smoke he was spreading. This is the demagogue’s trick, the Fascist’s ploy, exemplified most outrageously by the spurious and anti-Jewish Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Repeat a lie often enough and it begins to sound as if it must—or at least might—be so. “Falsehood flies,” observed Jonathan Swift, “and the truth comes limping after it.” McCarthy’s career shows how much hysteria a skilled and shameless prevaricator can stir up, especially when he claims to be fighting in a just cause. After all, if Communism was the ultimate evil, a lot could be hazarded—including objectivity and conventional morality—in opposing it.

Back in January 2000, the newly rebuilt Hayden Planetarium in New York City featured a space show titled Passport to the Universe, which took visitors on a virtual zoom from the planetarium out to the edge of the cosmos. En route, the audience viewed Earth, then the solar system, then watched the hundred billion stars of the Milky Way galaxy shrink, in turn, to barely visible dots on the planetarium's dome. Within a month of opening day, I received a letter from an Ivy League professor of psychology whose expertise was in things that make people feel insignificant. I never knew one could specialize in such a field. He wanted to administer a before-and-after questionnaire to visitors, assessing the depth of their depression after viewing the show. Passport to the Universe, he wrote, elicited the most dramatic feelings of smallness and insignificance he had ever experienced. How could that be? Every time I see the space show (and others we've produced), I feel alive and spirited and connected. I also feel large, knowing that the goings-on within the three pound human brain are what enabled us to figure out our place in the universe.

I fumbled in my pockets for my father’s map. I stared and rubbed the paper between my fingers. I read the sightings’ dot’s dates with my wormed eyes, connecting them in order. There was the first point where my father felt sure he’d seen mother digging in the neighbor’s yard across the street. And the second, in the field of power wires where Dad swore he saw her running at full speed. I connected dots until the first fifteen together formed a nostril. Dots 16 through 34 became an eye. Together the whole map made a perfect picture of my mother’s missing head. If I stared into the face, then, and focused on one clear section and let my brain go loose, I saw my mother’s eyes come open. I saw her mouth begin to move. Her voice echoed deep inside me, clear and brimming, bright, alive. She said, “Don’t worry, son. I’m fat and happy. They have cake here. My hair is clean.” She said, “The earth is slurred and I am sorry.” She said, “You are OK. I have your mind.” Her eyes seemed to swim around me. I felt her fingers in my hair. She whispered things she’d never mentioned. She nuzzled gleamings in my brain. As in: the day I’d drawn her flowers because all the fields were dying. As in: the downed bird we’d cleaned and given a name. Some of our years were wall to wall with wonder, she reminded me. In spite of any absence, we had that. I thought of my father, alone and elsewhere, his head cradled in his hands. I thought of the day he’d punched a hole straight through the kitchen wall, thinking she’d be tucked away inside. All those places he’d looked and never found her. Inside their mattress. In stained-glass windows. How he’d scoured the carpet for her stray hair and strung them all together with a ribbon; how he’d slept with that one lock swathed across his nostrils, hugging a pillow fitted with her nightshirt. How he’d dug up the backyard, stripped and sweating. How he’d played her favorite album on repeat and loud, a lure. How when we took up the carpet in my bedroom to find her, under the carpet there was wood. Under the wood there was cracked concrete. Under the concrete there was dirt. Under the dirt there was a cavity of water. I swam down into the water with my nose clenched and lungs burning in my chest but I could not find the bottom and I couldn’t see a thing.

I've gone the extra mile, put in the extra time, devoted everything I could to these things so that nothing could be left to chance, because chance after all, can be dangerous. But what I realize all that time, what I missed all along, is that chance is everywhere. It's also what life is mad of. It's all around us, but most of the time we never see it working. We turn left instead of right, we take the stairs instead of the elevator, cross the street for no apparent reason. Our lives are made of these little moments that somehow add up, and sometimes, if we look back, we can see chance at work. When we turned left we found something we were looking for, when we took the stairs we avoided something not meant for us. When we crossed the street, we met the person who was. Looking back it's easy to see all those things. To connect the dots and see that it was actually those things that made all the difference. But sometimes life gives us those rare moments where we do see chance as it's happening And in those moments, we have a choice. And sometimes we have to take a risk. And it's scary. It makes us vulnerable. But I know it's worth it.

In Amsterdam, I took a room in a small hotel located in the Jordann District and after lunch in a café went for a walk in the western parts of the city. In Flaubert’s Alexandria, the exotic had collected around camels, Arabs peacefully fishing and guttural cries. Modern Amsterdam provided different but analogous examples: buildings with elongated pale-pink bricks stuck together with curiously white mortar, long rows of narrow apartment blocks from the early twentieth century, with large ground-floor windows, bicycles parked outside every house, street furniture displaying a certain demographic scruffiness, an absence of ostentatious buildings, straight streets interspersed with small parks…..In one street lines with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a red front door and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there. Above me, on the second floor, I could see an apartment with three large windows and no curtains. The walls were painted white and decorated with a single large painting covered with small blue and red dots. There was an oaken desk against a wall, a large bookshelf and an armchair. I wanted the life that this space implied. I wanted a bicycle; I wanted to put my key in that red front door every evening. Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements my seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. My love for the apartment building was based on what I perceived to be its modesty. The building was comfortable but not grand. It suggested a society attracted to the financial mean. There was an honesty in its design. Whereas front doorways in London are prone to ape the look of classical temples, in Amsterdam they accept their status, avoiding pillars and plaster in favor of neat, undecorated brick. The building was modern in the best sense, speaking of order, cleanliness, and light. In the more fugitive, trivial associations of the word exotic, the charm of a foreign place arises from the simple idea of novelty and change-from finding camels where at home there are horses, for example, or unadorned apartment buildings where at home there are pillared ones. But there may be a more profound pleasure as well: we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide. And so it was with my enthusiasms in Amsterdam, which were connected to my dissatisfactions with my own country, including its lack of modernity and aesthetic simplicity, its resistance to urban life and its net-curtained mentality. What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

I watch Ethan try to connect the dots in his head, And suddenly his face falls into a sad smile. "Oh," he says. And that's all. I walk over to him, my bare feet sinking into the sand as I trudge along. He's grinning at me now, but it's not the usual plastered-on smile he usually has. This one is somehow more authentic. When I'm within a few feet of him, he holds his arms out. "You're going to be such a good leader," he says. "I'm so proud of you, Five." I embrace Ethan. His arms fold around me as he pats me on the back. He lets out a long, slow sigh and then starts to say something. I cut him off before he can get the words out. I can't stand to hear him say another thing. "Ethan, I'm really sorry about this. But it's for the best." I can feel his body clench as the blade slips out of my forearm sheath and into his back. It slides between his ribs-a lucky shot- then retracts back into my hoodie sleeve. It's over in an instant. I step away from him. He stands frozen, probably in shock. There's a deep spot of read blooming across the right side of his chest where the blade must have broken the skin. Blood drops down from the hidden wrist sheath, running over my right hand before falling from my fingertips to the sand. "It's over," I murmur, more to myself than to Ethan. He's probably not paying much attention to what I have to say. Tears are welling in his good eye, but I don't know if they're for me or for himself. He blinks once and then falls to the beach with a soft thud.

HlI watch Ethan try to connect the dots in his head, And suddenly his face falls into a sad smile. "Oh," he says. And that's all. I walk over to him, my bare feet sinking into the sand as I trudge along. He's grinning at me now, but it's not the usual plastered-on smile he usually has. This one is somehow more authentic. When I'm within a few feet of him, he holds his arms out. "You're going to be such a good leader," he says. "I'm so proud of you, Five." I embrace Ethan. His arms fold around me as he pats me on the back. He lets out a long, slow sigh and then starts to say something. I cut him off before he can get the words out. I can't stand to hear him say another thing. "Ethan, I'm really sorry about this. But it's for the best." I can feel his body clench as the blade slips out of my forearm sheath and into his back. It slides between his ribs-a lucky shot- then retracts back into my hoodie sleeve. It's over in an instant. I step away from him. He stands frozen, probably in shock. There's a deep spot of read blooming across the right side of his chest where the blade must have broken the skin. Blood drops down from the hidden wrist sheath, running over my right hand before falling from my fingertips to the sand. "It's over," I murmur, more to myself than to Ethan. He's probably not paying much attention to what I have to say. Tears are welling in his good eye, but I don't know if they're for me or for himself. He blinks once and then falls to the beach with a soft thud.

We were here And our memories are as dear to us as every slow motion moment or held breath So remember every instance before death Every first kiss, first dance, near miss, last chance, yes, no, maybe so Let us go the distance once more Let us remember all the moments that were and were not Like the point is something we can get and what we can get is what we got Because all we have are the times between the moments we connect each dot So live and remember Burn like an ember capable of starting fires Like each moment inspires the next Like memories are the context we put ourselves in So that life becomes the next of kin we need to notify in case of a big bang or Extinction level event Let now be our advent Let us live like we meant it Let us burn like we mean it Because this world doesn't give a shit if we end in a train wreck or a car crash If our story ends with a dot or dash If we were dust or ash Because all we were is all we’ll be And all we are is the in-between of so far, so good So forget every would, could, or should not Forget remembering how we forgot Live like a plot twist exists now and in memory Because we burn bright Our light leaves scars on the sun Let no one say we will be undone by time's passing The memories we are amassing will stand as testament That somehow we bent minds around the concept That we see others within ourselves That self-knowledge can't be found on bookshelves So who we are has no bearing on how we appear Look directly into every mirror Realize our reflection is the first sentence to a story And our story starts: "We were here."

What is a friend? A friend is one of the nicest things you can have – and one of the best things you can be. – Douglas Pagels, from These Are the Gifts I’d Like to Give to You (published 1999) Have steppingstones to look forward to, milestones to look back upon, and -- in between -- do everything it takes to have an abundance of connect-the-dot days that lead to happiness. – Douglas Pagels, from 30 Beautiful Things That Are True About You May you remember that though the roads we take can sometimes be difficult, those are often the ones that lead to the most beautiful views. – Douglas Pagels, from A Special Christmas Blessing Just for You Love of family and love of friends is where everything beautiful begins. – Douglas Pagels, from A Special Christmas Blessing Just for You I want you to be reminded from time to time that you are a wonderful gift, and one of the nicest things in this entire world... is your presence in it. – Douglas Pagels, from A Special Christmas Blessing Just for You Do your part for the planet. Do all those things you know you “should” do. Our grandchildren will either have words of praise for our efforts and our foresight, or words that condemn us for forgetting that they will live here long after we are gone. Don’t overlook the obvious: This is not a dress rehearsal. This is the real thing. Our presence has an impact, but our precautions do, too. – Douglas Pagels, from Words That Shine Like Stars The wisest people on earth are those who have a hard time recalling their worries and an easy time remembering their blessings. – Douglas Pagels, from These Are the Gifts I’d Like to Give to You Expressing your creativity is done more by the way you are living than by any other gesture. – Douglas Pagels, from These Are the Gifts I’d Like to Give to You If your pursuit of wealth causes you to sacrifice any aspect of your health, your priorities are heading you in the wrong direction. Don’t hesitate to make a “you” turn. – Douglas Pagels, from These Are the Gifts I’d Like to Give to You The more you’re bothered by something that’s wrong, the more you’re empowered to change things and make them right. The more we follow that philosophy as individuals, the easier it will be to brighten our horizons outward from there, taking in our communities, our cultures, our countries, and the common ground we stand on. The crucible of peace and goodwill is far too empty, and each of us must, in some way, help to fill it. – Douglas Pagels, from These Are the Gifts I’d Like to Give to You We can always do more and be more than we think we can. Let’s think less and imagine more. – Douglas Pagels, from These Are the Gifts I’d Like to Give to You