THE DOTS

I got several private messages, after posting a status of ‘You are right Mr Jobs, "You can't connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking backwards." that's why life can be so unpredictable and has no pattern at the beginning but not later on :)’
“What did you mean in your status, Nurul?”
I found it quite difficult to answer in a sms. It won’t give me enough space to tell the whole ideas within. Moreover, it takes quite long time for me to realize the relation of Jobs’ quote with my experience.
So let me start with the children’s game of connecting dots. When i was child, i had a book of this game. Each page had a certain disguised pattern. The pattern was revealed after you see the whole dots in it, thoroughly. The picture then became clearer as you trying to connect each dots, carefully. AHA! You see a clear picture of a star, lets say.
So how that story relate to what we talk about at the beginning?
It is an abstract idea. We shall start, again, from the dots. Let’s make an agreement that a dot represents certain point of our life. It could be time when we decide to enter a school, to join a particular work, to travel, to break up with our girl/oy friend. Furthermore, it could be something that has nothing to do with your effort. The time where you significant others die, disaster, get gift, win a lottery or many others. Simply to say that the life of ours consist of many dots.

We may hope that the upcoming dot will be in a certain direction and so we could guess what pattern it might be. This is what we recognise as a plan. As a plan, it has 50% chance to succeed and the opposite. A couple may have a plan to marry next week but what can they say if one of them get an accident and die a day before the marriage.
A dot can suddenly happens without our consents. A child in remote area that has almost no chance to go to school because does not have enough money. She prays a lot and do thing she usually do like helping her parents to earn some money. As time goes by, she might already give up with her wish to educate herself (she predicts the dot’s slop will go down). Until, all of sudden a wealth generous woman comes into her life and makes her dream comes true (The dot direction goes up).
Let me make this clearer. One important different between the game of connecting dots and the dots in our life is we can not predict where and how the next dot will appear. That is why we can not connect the dots forwardly. All we have to do is just believe that somehow (whatever it will happen) we could be sure that it will create a certain pattern. It will lead us to somewhere.
Please see the disguised picture of star in this article. The dot starts from the bottom corner then it comes up and goes down at certain point. Since we pretend that this is a star. We may hope that the dots will still come down almost the same long time with the up. What is happening in a real life? We hope the direction will go up right after the first dot went down. In other words, we experience unpleasant events, failures. We feel frustated, angry, depressed when find the fact that the slope keeps going down. But it nice to be in that way. So you give your life chance to create a star at the end. Otherwise it will be something else or has no pattern at all.
What if your pattern is a tree? And you start your life from the bottom, the root, as a base for you to move forward. That is how the influential people being built. They might very poor at the aerly of their life. They might make mistake by doing drug abused, make many failures, being jailed for the voices they have. All you have to do is to accept your life as it is. Forgive yourself for the mistakes you made. Keep moving on and being ready for whatever the future brings. LIFE WILL ALWAYS BE A HAPPY SURPRISE!!