Notice how you arrived at your current thought. You were thinking about one thing, and then another, and then another, and if the first is compared with the last they appear to have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. Complete strangers. And yet you got from one to the other without a single leap anywhere.
Go back through it slowly and every link is there. Each step was entirely reasonable and follows obviously from the one before. The chain was continuous the whole time and it was simply invisible while you were inside it, because from inside a chain only the link being stood on can be seen.
This is true of thoughts and it appears to be true of a great deal more than thoughts. The pattern is too consistent to be only about thinking, and once it has been noticed in one place it starts turning up in others.
Randomness is a position
What looks random is very often just something seen from too close, or from the wrong angle, or with too few of the pieces yet available. The randomness is not a property of the events themselves. It is a property of where we happen to be standing, and where we stand can change.
Everybody has had the experience of a period that made no sense whatsoever at the time and made complete sense eleven years later. Nothing about those events changed in the interval and none of them could be altered. What changed is that enough of the surrounding material had arrived for the shape to become visible, and at the time there was no possible way to see it and no amount of effort would have helped.
Which raises a rather uncomfortable question about the present, which is that everybody is currently inside a period whose shape they cannot see. And the inability to see it says precisely nothing about whether there is one, because that was also true the last four times.
The invisible connection
There is a picture that helps, and it is only a picture and should be held loosely. Everything that exists connected to everything else by a mesh that cannot be seen. Not as a metaphor for how things influence each other. Actually joined, at some level beneath the level at which things appear separate.
None of this can be proved and it sounds like a feeling dressed up as a claim. But look at how anything is actually composed and the separations get harder and harder to locate the further down you go. At a certain point everything is the same small handful of things arranged differently, and the boundary between one object and another turns out to be a description we use for convenience rather than something that is there.
If that holds for objects, there is no obvious reason it should stop politely at people. And if it does not stop at people, then a great deal of what we do to each other is being done, in some fashion nobody understands, to ourselves. What to do with that thought is not clear, and it does not put down easily.
Living as though
What difference does any of this make on an ordinary day? Considerably less than anybody would like. It gets forgotten constantly and everything is treated as separate, including oneself, all day, every day, without noticing.
But it changes one thing, and the change is worth something. When something happens that makes no sense, it is no longer assumed to be meaningless. It is assumed instead that we are standing too close to it, and that this is a link in something whose shape will not be available for years and possibly not at all.
That is not the same as believing everything happens for a reason, which is a very hard sentence to say honestly in front of somebody who is suffering. It is smaller and more bearable than that. It only says that not being able to see a connection is very weak evidence that there is not one, and everybody has been wrong about this too many times to keep trusting where they happen to be standing.
