Thursday, July 03, 2008

Making sense of it...

All good stories have a plot. In a novel, in a movie, nothing happens without reason. In the end everything comes together. It all makes sense - eventually.


There is this desire in us that things should make sense. At least in the end. We do not like movies that don't tie it up well and books that leave us with more questions than answers.


This desire is reflected in the way we view life. We expect life to have a plot. We either try to make sense of what the plot is. Or we seek to fill in the gaps so that it makes sense. Or believe that it will all make sense in the end - like in the movies and books…


But will it?

5 comments:

Julie Kibler said...

I think in the long run (i.e., in the afterlife!), it will. I've noticed as I've gotten older, things make a lot more and a lot less sense, all at once. But, I definitely see the purpose in things that happened 15 or 20 years ago that I would never have understood that way at the time. That whole thing of seeing two paths and choosing one for reasons you don't quite understand, and then seeing how differently your life would have been had you not.

Anonymous said...

Our lives with Christ tie up better than any Hollywood movie. God has a plan, but many things won't make sense until we have that heavenly perspective. So right now, we walk by.....f....a........i.........t......h.....

Marsha said...

does this post have anything to do with the fact that I couldn't give you a better reason for liking that movie?!

Anonymous said...

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some others to be chewed and digested" so goes the saying. If what happens in life is to be counted as the lines and paragraphs of a book that we read... perhaps some of those events are merely to be tasted...and others to be swallowed.. and some others to be chewed and digested...

In life, we are connecting dots like how little kids does in their little books... dots that eventually turn out to be butterflies..or a teddy-bear... or a boat... or an airplane... one that kids are unaware as they begin connecting the first dot to the second.. not making much sense of what they have connected but eventually bringing out in them the 'wow' of having drawn a picture of something... the pictures that we now realize of our childhood, the pictures that our parents now realize of their youth, the pictures that our grand parents now realize of their life...

...we continue to draw those unseen pictures, little strokes now and then, a few splashes here and there..none that really make much sense but develop in time to a greater definition...

(when the school principal punished the children for leaning on her table, its only meaning then was the arrogance of a stupid principal... it later had a meaning of discipline..!!)

Is that what we call context-reframing in psychology?

Bungz said...

Julie - True. We do try to make sense of our life in retrospect... But then again, did it some together or do we try to put it together in a logical sequence?

Anon - True. Faith is believing the things that we do not see... And guess it is in faith that we can say that it will make sense one day...

Marsha - No, Marsh. It doesn't. Honest.

Shahir - The question again is, do we just connect the dots and then figure out what the pattern is or do the dots actually have a pattern even before we connect it? Just a thought...