Puzzled

"Arrange whatever pieces come your way." Sylvia Plath

He was brilliant with jigsaw puzzles. As I watched him work on a puzzle, I saw that he would look at some pieces and see that they didn't fit -- not yet. So he put them to the side for later. Then as he moved toward the completion of the puzzle, he would go back to those pieces he had set aside, and then it was time to add them.

I would no doubt improve my spatial skills by working jigsaw puzzles. However, up to this point I haven't done that. Probably because my inherent spatial skills are not strong, I have always found jigsaw puzzles immensely frustrating. Give me a word puzzle, and I am a whiz kid. Give me seemingly unrelated ideas, and I will fairly quickly find the common thread to have it all make sense. It's just the way my brain naturally works, I suppose.

In life, we sometimes will have something come our way that makes no sense. It doesn't seem to fit into our lives. Often it's frustrating, and sometimes it's painful. It may be a poor decision that we make, and we are left to live with the unpleasant consequences. It could be something beyond our control that comes in seemingly out of left field. I have lived long enough now to have experienced that many of these odd pieces, if put aside, will eventually fit into the big puzzle picture. I like to think of it this way: Sooner or later, if we want to, we will find a very useful purpose for those pieces. That all our experiences will untimately enrich us, if we let them.

I think the trick to staying happy and sane, is to not fight those pieces that don't fit. Just allow them to be. Set them aside, and believe that one day the time will come when they will fit into the big picture of our lives just beautifully.

Susan