There is something about life which makes me wonder. Which, I know sounds very basic. But is it? Life is a circle. There is the cycle of birth and death, child to old man/woman whatever your case may be. The circle of day to night. Winter to fall. The rise of Rome to its fall. Each day is a circle, dawn to dawn. The cycle of a week. A month. A year. The Big Bang to… whatever the ending may be.
So what does it all mean? I know the ‘life is a circle’ idea. Learn from your mistakes or you are doomed to make them again. But isn’t there more?
Is there a life triangle? A life octagon? How about a life parallelogram?
Stick with me, it gets easier. I hope.
I’m sure I could find, or make up, examples of the shapes mentioned above. The human brain is mystic and wise and completely able to lie to itself at all times.
Do we let our brain lie to us? Of course we do. We want to believe what we want to believe, true or false. And why do we want to believe? Because our brain demands we are the center of our own universe and anything that speaks otherwise is perceived as the lier.
I hate to say it, but all politicians I’ve seen definitely believe they are the center of their own universes. No names, but I am sure many of you can think of a multitude of your own examples.
I know I have gone from circles to the center of our universe all in a handful of paragraphs, but I have complete confidence that somehow I will bring them all together in the end. And if I don’t, you will never know, because you will never see this post.
Take the image of an heptagon (seven sides). Now draw a circle around the inside and put the politician, or whomever, inside the circle. Now there is a politician in his own universe, gathering his own power and glory. But what of the points outside the circle? Who are they?
Remember the line above about letting our brains lie to us? If you answered ‘us’ to the question, you are correct. The mistakes we make, those we leave out – the outer points of the heptagon – are forgotten.
So maybe the image of a circle is the best fit for our world. A circle is smooth, no points left out. In the roundness of a circle, we remember the mistakes of our past, the fact of birth to death, day to night, night to day. The great thing about the circle is that we are all equidistant from those across from us. It doesn’t take a miracle for me, on my point on the circle, to reach across to you on your point. Maybe you are a friend who needs comfort or a child who needs food. I am equally able to reach out of my own universe to touch yours.
I know somewhere you have seen the image of people, hand-in-hand, circling the globe. Perhaps the best circle, the perfect circle, of them all.
Imagine it. A circle of every human on this planet, and those currently above it, holding hands in a circle. Would it span the circumference of the world? The Solar System? The Milky Way? How about the entire Universe?
And, even in that all-encompassing circle, we are still equidistant from those across from us. No one is left out.
We can still reach out a hand in comfort. Or happiness. Or love.
We can still reach across to comfort a grieving mother and we can still reach across to feed a hungry child.
Maybe Disney was right this time. The circle is the perfect shape for our world.
