Putting It Together, "Piece by Piece"

Each of us is a work in progress, throughout the journey of our life. We evolve and grow over time. We change course many times, never really sure if we are actually taking the right road. The day we die, we are still a work in progress, incomplete and unfinished.

Somehow, this very idea is not an entirely satisfactory notion. We live our entire lives never fully certain of who we are or what we should be doing with our lives. When we are younger, we dream of the wonderful things we will accomplish. Over time our dreams change and our realities may be very far from the one's we saw for ourselves when we were young. We experience many moments which are pleasant and empowering. We also experience in the course of our life not a few disappointments. And during the entire journey, we are never fully certain where we are going to end up, or even when we will get there, wherever that is. With all these uncertainties, how are we to make any sense of all this?

Consider what we do when we solve a jigsaw puzzle. First, we find the pieces with straight sides and the corner pieces. We then proceed to construct the outer border of the puzzle, creating a space which did not exist before we put all the pieces in place. Then we match pieces by color or a line in one piece that merges with a line in one of the pieces already in place. And we find the pieces that fit together. One by one, we build the image in the jigsaw puzzle, the image that the pieces that were separated hid from us. And we continue on, doing this, until we find the last piece remaining and put it into the puzzle.

The only difference between the way a person builds a life and the way we solve a jigsaw puzzle, is that people are never completed. We never live long enough to put in that last piece because there is always a new last piece, every day that we are alive. Our lives are always changing and we are always changing, so there never is a last piece. But otherwise, the two ideas are pretty much alike. In both cases, we are constantly looking for the right piece that fits into the puzzle, at the place and time that we are in the process.

Our lives develop one step at a time, right before our eyes. Even if we don't know what is coming next, we can always look ahead with the hope that good and wonderful things lay ahead for us. Of course, that isn't always the case. But with the coming of each new day, we learn something new, we meet new people who come into our lives and we have new experiences that broaden our understanding of who we are and what our world is all about. Somehow we manage to integrate these ideas, our new acquaintances and new experiences into our lives, figuring out what is a good fit for us and what isn't a good fit. In the process, we change, evolve and grow as a person.

In this life, there are no guarantees for any of us about how things are going to turn out for us. Every day, we have to fit new people, new information and new experiences constantly into our lives, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. This is a really random process. However random it is, though, it still seems to work well enough for most of us. Most of us are able to make the journey without too many serious incidents. The uncertainty factor is just part of the equation. We just have to understand that with each coming day there are going be new puzzle parts that we are going to have to somehow fit into the jigsaw puzzle that is our life. And that pretty much is just the way it is.