As a jig-saw puzzle fanatic I can obsess for hours over a thousand random puzzle pieces spread across a card-table waiting for sense to be made from it all, because to me it’s a challenge and perhaps a metaphor for LIFE.
What makes ‘the sense’ part you might ask in a puzzle or in LIFE?
For the card-table puzzle, the ‘sense’ is matching knobs and holes into slots that fit them until you complete the entire picture printed atop those individual puzzle pieces giving it a ‘united wholeness composed of 1000 individual parts.’
With LIFE, ‘sense-making’ is less simple or easily defined.
But the funny thing about this particular multi-piece puzzle I was so engrossed in, is that yesterday I was down to the last two pieces from puzzle completion (that’s 998 pieces done) and I had two open slots ready for them to fit into, but to my amazement and annoyance, they didn’t fit. Not even close—different knobs and shapes completely from the two slots available.
How can this be?
I mean this isn’t a life-altering situation here, but how can these be the last two pieces and not fit the two available slots for them? I’ve put this puzzle together half a dozen times before—they ALL fit together perfectly. This just CAN’T happen.
But unfortunately it DID happen. So did I slip unaware into an alternate universe and my puzzle stayed in the previous one? What’s going on here?
After closer inspection, it turns out that one small ‘look-alike’ piece in the frame was 3 places to the left of where it should have resided, so that all the other pieces shifted to the right and misaligned the hole slots above them. One single piece out of place in the 4-piece string caused the slot shape differences atop them. So when I changed the twin-like frame pieces to their correct locations, the two remaining puzzle pieces fit perfectly into the new slots now available. Just like magic. Mental melt-down averted.
Now in one sense this is really NO big deal and hardly worth even mentioning here, except I also consider these puzzles as a metaphor for LIFE; so how does this likewise apply to LIFE?
The presumed metaphor: One stinking piece out of place in the framework of your life can throw everything else out of alignment and cause turmoil and confusion in your daily affairs until you resolve the offending problem and realign your dissonant parts.
One piece of your life that looks almost exactly like the correct piece you need for your life to function competently and completely may be slightly out of sync with the rest, and because of that, all your other life parts in turn fail to engage as they should, and it disrupts your entire life’s flow and rhythm.
Questions that may arise along these ‘life misalignment’ lines might be:
- Are you at peace with yourself? Are you doing what you want to be doing with your life?
- Are you content with your job or your friends or even with yourself?
- Do you feel like you are missing some key component in your life that would smooth out all the other problems, but you don’t know what that missing piece might be?
- Are you satisfied with your efforts to be the person you wish to be?
- Are you happy to face down each day’s challenges knowing that you are truly giving it your best effort every step of the way?
In truth I must admit that some part of me upon seeing the two remaining pieces not matching the slots available for puzzle completion wanted to say, “Heck with it. There is something out of place here somewhere but it’s just not worth the effort to try to find the problem. I can just toss it all back in the box knowing that the correct amount of pieces are here for the next time I try to put it together, even if they don’t currently match up.”
But that stubborn, obsessive, competitive part of me said ‘NO. Find the problem. Fix it. Do it RIGHT or don’t do it at all.’
That’s what LIFE is about as well. Find the problems in your life (first admit them to yourself) and fix them. Live your life with integrity and purpose by knowing who you are as a person.
Don’t ever give up on yourself, and don’t ever let yourself off too easily when you know better. Don’t get lazy. Be determined to do the right thing in your life—to BE the right person—the BEST person you can be.
You can go the distance. You can get the job done right. You got this!
Don’t toss your life’s puzzle because you are two slots off completion. See it through. Reassess, realign, and try it again until you get it all to fit together in harmony.
It’s all a test to see what you are made of when your life goes astray. Every day is an opportunity to FIND YOUR TRUTH in every situation that you encounter because LIFE is set up that way—offering many opportunities, both large and small, to test your worth.
To some folks LIFE always comes easily, and all their pieces fit neatly into place with the first try. For the rest of us, we may have to work at it a bit more; but if we don’t give up, we will find the right slot to fit into and then our entire LIFE picture can be complete.
Because in the end that’s what we ALL hope to achieve for our lives—a beautiful, complete picture full of a thousand unified pieces that eventually make us whole.