Joining the Dots.

How much effort do you go to to join the dots?

To catch up on lost threads and trains of conversation that occur to
you, parked ideas, forgotten dreams and ambitions, friendships and
relationships that stalled or decayed?

Do you bother to build bridges to the things that the ebb of time and
flow separated?

Maybe not and maybe you shouldn't.

Plenty of people feel as though they move on.

And of course they do in some ways.

And of course they don't in some ways.


I'm not talking about something as crass as closure. I'm not Freud.
And frankly I am not sure I fully believe or have any interest in the
concept.

I suspect many people seek closure on things that are already closed.
That's more like a disease process than what I think I'm talking
about.

I am just talking about linking things up, little fragments of life
scattered through time.

Like a join the dots book.

Like a mind map. God knows it's been a popular enough concept in
recent years, because this is how our brain actually works, ideas
linked in multi-colours from felt tip pens.


We do this all the time. The Internet allows us to track down any song
lyric. It ruins every radio competition for us unless we are listening
in the car. Any little funny fact can be nowadays be drawn, clarified
or refuted by QI or Wikipedia.

Pub quizzes lost their innocence years ago. There's bound to be
somebody clicking away on his mobile phone whether or not he makes the
effort to disguise his action with a visit to the lavatory. Apologies
for the gratuitous use of the word lavatory. But I'm just try to make
a point. (And while I'm at it…..lavatory, lavatory, lavatory. That's
closure for you).


How much should you try to complete your pictures? Well, you can
sometimes tie an invisible loop with a letter to the past, or the
present. There are even modern applications that will send an e-mail
to yourself or somebody else in the future. The alarm clock has
finally woken up. When we finally sleep there will be a digital legacy
that in some way represents us. This will be mine.

But when you sketch your way through life, it is sometimes nice to
take a moment to go back and fill in the colour.

I'm not talking about reminiscence.

Okay well maybe I am. But not in the 'let's all gather round the photo
album' kind of way. I am talking about the version that is a bit more…
a bit more.. a bit more…. well….. me.


How much effort should you go to?

I'll tell you.


Some.