There is a picture that was painted back in the mid 1800s that I just love. I call it Sunday In The Park, or something close to that(A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte ,to be exact). It’s a beautiful painting that shows people dressed in their period clothes, enjoying a sunny day in the park. There is lush green grass, a lake, children, dogs, everything you would expect to see on a perfect day in the park. What makes this painting unique is that it isn’t painted in brush strokes; it is painted in hundreds, if not thousands, of dots. It reminds me of what you would get if you took a modern day computer picture print out and blew it up over and over again. After a while you would see that it is nothing more than a series of dots. It’s hard to believe that someone had that perspective, that way of seeing things back in the 1800s.

 
I remember seeing scene in a movie in which the camera had zoomed in on one tiny area of this picture. It was on a shadow. Thus, all you saw on the screen were a few little black dots, maybe a gray or two. On the entire movie screen it was just those few dots. Soon the camera started to zoom back and a few more dots started to appear. Some red, blue and green dots appeared and the camera continued to zoom out and more colors of yellow, purple and every shade of the color spectrum all looking like nothing more than dots on the screen. The camera continued to zoom out further and further until boom, there you had it; a big beautiful picture of Sunday in the Park. It was such a great scene and such a great moment.

 
I thought about that scene for a long time. It hit me that there were so many lessons to be pulled from it. It seemed to me that it could be like a picture of our lives. If we were able to have a huge picture of our lives, from beginning to end, A-Z, it could look like this. Of course, for most of us, much of this painting has yet to be created. But if we were to have this painting of our lives, it would be as if every day of our lives was a dot. Every person that we met, every experience that we had, every moment that we had on this earth would be a dot, all different colors and all different shades.

 
We have so many moments in our lives that seem so random, so meaningless. If we could step back and see the bigger picture we would realize that it all goes together; it’s what makes up our own unique, colorful life. Some dots would be bright and colorful while others would be dark and dull. If we, like the camera in the movie, only zoomed in on the dark areas, the shadows, and all we did was to stay focused on those clusters of black dots, we would interpret it all as a very dark and bleak picture, one that we would not like. If we went from random dark spot to random dark spot and that is all we looked at, we would be missing the bigger picture. Life is full of highs and lows. We need it all to appreciate the good, the bad, the unimportant and the precious moments. We love the sunny days but when the sun shines it is going to cast a shadow. You have got to have rain to have a rainbow. We don’t like the bad moments that happen in this life but they do make us appreciate the good and remind us to hold tight to the things that we love. They give us perspective.

 
We have to step back. We have to step back and look at the bigger picture. Sometimes we just don’t have enough pieces of the puzzle to figure it all out and it might even take years for all the random dots to take form. All we know for sure is that each moment, good or bad, light or dark, help to make up a much bigger picture, a big beautiful picture that is our life. Not learning from our mistakes, making poor choices, poor twists of fate, all these things can create many more dark areas in our lives than we wanted but that doesn’t mean a beautiful picture is not going to be created from this. We just can’t waste our time focusing on the bad or worrying about the meaning of random events, all we can do is to try to focus on creating as many bright and colorful moments as possible and to appreciate the fullness and the richness of the picture that we are creating.