Making Connections

 

Although the idea of all things being connected is not a new idea, it is a wondrous idea to discover and rediscover over and over again.

Those connections can be in big ways.

After centuries of creating medical specialists, modern medical techniques are beginning to adopt the holistic idea of treating our bodies, minds and spirits as one.  For example, an eye, ears, nose and throat guy might consider that the symptoms he/she is treating just might have roots somewhere else.  Oncologists are seeing a greater survival rate in those patients who take a spiritual approach to their cancer as well as altering their diets, exercising and taking their medicine.

Those connections can happen in small ways.

 

Our minds process thousands of images every day, recording them and storing them, saving them for our dreams or our designs.  It might be easy to see how our dreams, if we remember them, use some of those images, and the meanings we assign to them, to send messages to our conscious world.  But what do I mean by designs?  Whether it's decorating a room, designing a piece of jewelry, composing a photograph, arranging a buffet table, planting flowers, or organizing our work files, unrelated patterns like buildings in a row, colors in a piece of fabric, shapes in a garden, cars parked around a fountain, a shop window, a painting, or children playing ... the things we see find a way of influencing the things we do and most of it happens without our even knowing it.

I am finding greater intrigue in the amazing way our minds work.  No matter how disconnected and unrelated images are, if we were to see five images in a row ... our minds can't help but try to connect them in a way that makes sense for us.

 

Let me show you what I mean.  Let's say we are standing in front of a blank wall.  On that wall are five different pictures:



   
 

 

As far as I know, at his very moment, there is no connection at all between these five objects.  I chose them randomly, and yet, even as we look at them, our minds are making some sort of connection between them.

We can't help it.

 

Every time our minds say, "WHAT?!!", we start processing the images, chewing on them, rolling them over in our minds, tasting the possibilities.

I love those things in life that jump out at me and make me say, "WHAT?!!"  They stop the daily routine and force me to look at them.  I can almost feel my imagination stretch, my mind broadening to include a set of images that have no connection with the rest of my experience. 

It is in those tiny moments that we grow! 
It is in those tiny moments that we find inspiration. 
It is in those tiny moments that answers come to us.

How many times have you been thinking about a big decision or worrying about an assignment and you seek out a park bench or a big rock in the middle of the woods or a quiet chair in a coffee house?  Your mind finds your answer by watching life go by, whether it's bees in a flower garden, two rabbits stepping out from a grove of trees that are in the shape of a company logo or the lady across from you passing out rolls to her children and all of the sudden the pattern of her dress clicks open a place in your brain where the perfect answer comes tumbling out?

You see, right along side the "WHAT?!!"s are the "AH-HAH!!!"s ... my other favorite ... those tiny moments where the curtain pulls back, the fog clears and our hearts jump ... where we know that we know that we know.

"AH-HAHH!!!"

 

 

While I have been writing about connections, I have looked at those five pictures and my mind has connected them. 

The connection, for me, is Lucerne, Switzerland.  We didn't fly a Geebee, but we flew a 747 to Europe, and took an evening train to Lucerne.  Behind the sign in desk at the hotel were beautiful oil paintings that included the colors in these images.  We woke up early, and had a wonderful continental breakfast that included breads, meats, eggs and fresh fruit.  We took two pears with us for a snack later on and walked through the city, among the shops, where I chose a silk scarf among a beautiful display of hats and scarves.  We walked to the statue of the Lion of Lucerne which, in itself, is a story I'd like to share:

The Swiss have a long tradition of supplying mercenaries to foreign governments (the Swiss Guard has been assigned to guard the pope for centuries and still do today). Because the Swiss have been politically neutral for centuries and have long enjoyed a reputation for honoring their agreements, a pope or emperor could be confident that his Swiss Guards wouldn't turn on him when the political winds shifted direction.

   

The Swiss Guards' honor was put to the test in 1792, when--after trying to escape the French Revolution--King Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and their children were hauled back to the Tuileries Palace in Paris. A mob of working-class Parisians stormed the palace in search of aristocratic blood. More than 700 Swiss officers and soldiers died while defending the palace, without knowing that their royal employers--like Elvis--had left the building.

In the early 1800s, the Danish artist Bertel Thorvaldsen was hired to sculpt a monument to the fallen Swiss Guards. The sculpture was carved in a sandstone cliff above the city center, near Lucerne's Glacier Garden and the Panorama, and it has attracted countless visitors since its dedication in 1821.


The statue is one of the saddest statues I have ever seen.  We couldn't help but walk away quietly, thinking of those brave men, giving their education, their courage, their valor, their military prowess, their principles ... their EVERYTHING for nothing.  What a tragedy.  What a noble lesson and such a price to pay that we might all learn from it.  We left there and walked through the streets another way to where we stopped and ordered hot tea with sandwiches at a sidewalk cafe.  It was the most thoughtful day.



For me those images connected to form of a memory, but for someone else, they might inspire a story or a dream, a poem or a speech ... 

I'm wondering ... What inspires you?

What images do you feed your mind and what connections does your mind make?  How do you process them?  What inspires you?