I was in a restaurant the other day – you know, one of those high class-dining establishments that hands out coloring placemats and crayons for entertainment in hopes of containment. Naturally, they didn’t ask if I wanted one, so I had to ask for one myself.  Much to my surprise, at first glance, I could not mentally connect the dots, which ultimately form a picture. Not that I am a mystic-puzzle solver, but most of the time the shape is so obvious that you don’t need to phyically connect the dots.

Two things here might or might not surprise you. First, I can act like any five-year-old. Both in a good way AND the bratty way. Give me a coloring mat or a surprise in my meal and I’m a happy little soul. Second, I am easily entertained.

As I looked at the dots and numbers on my mat, I realized that I couldn’t see the outcome without connecting the dots. It bothered me a bit that I couldn’t see the big picture here.  It bothered me that I had in front of me the answer, but couldn’t see it.

The irony of my predicament was not lost on me. How often has the answer been staring us in the face, and we look, and look, and look everywhere but right in front of us. Why is it that people look further than the answer in front of them? Is it that we can’t believe how easy the answer is? Or that the answer can’t be that obvious? Why is it that we have to look for a million other answers, when the only one we need is always within reach?

So I turned my mat around and looked at my dots from another angle – still nothing. I thought maybe if I held the mat up in the air and viewed the dots from the bottom, the shape would appear (similar to the idea of looking into a mirror for the reverse image). Here too, nothing.  Plus, since I was already dining alone, I thought I had better cool it on the “hey mama, look at that strange man being weird over there” actions.

It’s a simple process of connecting the dots, yet to me, it seemed a much bigger issue. I could have taken one of my crayons out and solved the mystery in a minute, and be done with this discussion, but to me, it was much more than just connecting the dots. But then is it? Or do we try to make more out of something than it is?  Are we always looking for something that we just can’t see?

For those of you that have read previous ramblings of mine, you know that I do not proclaim to be any type of genius. Like most things in life, sometimes it’s easy to connect the dots and other times you need the numbers to help you on your way.

We recently did a video interview with John Baldessari for our website. And I can’t help but think about his use of dots over the faces of his subjects. His thinking is that when you remove the facial recognition of a person, you view them as something else. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if one day every person in the world wore a big dot over his or her face. Then you would lose your title, your identity for a day. The teacher is no longer a teacher, the student no longer a student, the police officer and criminal become indistinguishable. It would be hard to tell the nuclear physicist from the town idiot. For a day we would all be the same. Sure, there would be some physical differences, but we would all be dots (and for the NON-CONFORMIST like me, you could choose the color of your dot).

Think about it. For a day, we could co-exist as one. You wouldn’t know who your enemy is. It would be hard to be judgmental or prejudiced because everyone would look like you.  For a day you could be the real you, without letting fear or doubt suppress who we really are. I think it would be the perfect and ideal world we all dream about.

As my waitress dropped my plate of over-cooked scrambled eggs over my placemat – my thought process was interrupted. Kind of like being woken up from a really good dream and wanting to go back to sleep to relive it. Today it wasn’t going to happen. So, thank you Mr. Baldessari and stupid placemat printing company for making me think. Making me realize what 20 years of organized religion and then another 20 years of psychotherapy have been trying to tell me. We are all one. We are all connected. We just have to not see it. Sign me,

Trying to connect the dots,