I was at a meeting at a church and tucked under the table at which I was sitting was an old bulletin from a Sunday long past. Clearly the bulletin had been in the possession of a child who liked to doodle. I was struck by the doodles, the kind of universal themes that one finds in almost all doodles – faces, crowns, fangs, little cars. Some drawings were clearly begun and then scratched out.
It made me smile, picturing a long church service where the person may have been a bit bored, remembering all the boring events of my own childhood that doodles and peppermints got me through. I guess too it was the universality of the practice of doodling when bored.
As a human race we really do have so much in common when you pay attention to the little things. Noise at a playground, cheers at a hockey game, that ooh ahh response at large gatherings for fireworks – these are responses that seem almost hard-wired.
I love that when I slow down, I can see the connective tissue, the links and few degrees of separation between people all around me. When we are bored, we doodle, when we see something beautiful or frightening, we gasp and when we take time to notice we learn more and more about what it is to be part of the human race.
How different does it make the world around us look when we are seeking our commonalities and not focusing on the divides? When we are looking for connections and not dividing factors? When we see what is strong not what is wrong? While we honour our differences and our unique gifts, there is also a beauty in where we overlap. Doodles in our boredom and beauty in our shared experience.
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