Life doesn’t go in Straight Lines
"Life doesn’t go in straight lines darling…it has its up and downs and you wouldn’t want it any other way…you wouldn’t achieve or learn anything, and it would be boring" - Ruth Shell (my fabulous, quietly strong, octogenarian Grandmother)
My grandmother said this to me the other day in response to my saying that I needed to change a few things and I have passed it forward some 5 times already. Muse on its wisdom on your own, and/or feel free to read some of my musings below…
Among feeling better this quote has made me wonder:
What shape were the lines of our lives?
Likely some form of squiggly, abstract mess - that we then turn into a clear/straight line when we create our narrative/backstory. With the benefit of hindsight everything seems as it was meant to be…and we can (re-)tell it in a linear fashion.
Yet really, my/our lives are a profusion of variously shaped and patterned lines - interconnecting and weaving lines forming the fabric of our existance…far more complex to forsee and talk about, yet far richer and more beautiful for it!
Image: from AmoebaAbstracts 2 (c) Marius Watz (source) - you can check out the Marius link to see some amazing and beautiful moving visuals too..
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March 24th, 2006 at 8:28 pm
it’s a good entry Natnat. And thank your grandmother again, it had a real impact on me. A simple but true point. And thank you Lord that life ‘doesn’t go in straight lines darling…’ Although, as you say we like linear, or rather patterns. They bring warmth, and ‘it was meant to be’ conversations with others and ourselves. I’m unclear whether or not it’s a deliberate avoidance on our parts; this blindness to the irregular path of our lives. Is it because there is too much to explain, too much to make a coherent story from, when looking at the micro level? Perhaps we just like to observe the end effect: the macro? That is, simply, it could be a matter of chosen perspective. Because like Brownian motion there are two apparently contradictory qualities. That which is chaotic (at a molecule level) and that which is an observable order (at the collective level). So we miss the chaos only to see that over time we have expanded, evenly.
p.s. I think I am saying what you have already… perhaps I just wanted to say Brownian motion just the once today? Humm…
April 7th, 2006 at 6:23 am
I want to hear your thoughts on Mandalas- the shell is one of the classics. Just ame back from a great graphic recording seminar that suggested 7 ways of recording material…..
Posters
Lists
Cluster Diagrams
Matrixes/Models
Organization diagrams
Flow Charts
and Mandalas
going from the simplest to the most complex-
I am experimenting with starting each morning designing a mandala for the day (kind of a blog with an audience of one:me)
so tell me what you think and tell me how you are.
Happy Passover.
Marge
June 3rd, 2007 at 5:10 am
Stories move in circles. They don’t move in straight lines.
So it helps if you listen in circles. There are stories insidestories
and stories between stories, and finding your way through them
is as easy and as hard as finding your way home.
And part of the finding is the getting lost.
And when you’re lost, you start to look around and to listen.
Corer Fischer, Albert Greenberg, and Naomi Newman
of A Traveling Jewish Theatre, Coming from a Great Distance - discovered via http://www.deenametzger.com/ discovered via exploring the Storyfield Conference website - I would like to learn more about and from deena somehow