The Missing Pieces of the Puzzle

Sometimes I feel like my life is like a jig saw puzzle and some of the pieces are missing.

You know…

You get out a jig saw puzzle box and empty out all the pieces on to a table or other suitable surface and you begin to turn all the pieces face up.

I call this the WOW “look at this – there is an awful lot of pieces here”.

And then I say to myself, “why did I have to use the negative word ‘awful’?”.

There I go already deciding that something is awful and I have just started!!

Next you begin sorting through the pieces.

I call this the awareness phase.

You know, that is when you begin to notice different colors, patterns, the shapes of the pieces, etc.

That is when I always begin to look for the ones with the straight edges because those pieces mark the perimeter of the picture unless of course you have a round shaped puzzle.

I don’t know about you, but I have never attempted a round one– the square or rectangular ones are challenging enough and the thought of a round one presents additional mind pictures — like the need to be well-rounded…

Anyway back to the straight-edged pieces – they form the perimeter of the picture, the outer edge. Those pieces are like the boundaries we set up for ourselves that tell us where we can go and where we can’t.

As a child we need those boundaries to help keep us safe because we are unaware of what potential dangers may lurk around the next corner and we start hearing the word ‘NO’ a lot in our lives and then there is that list of don’ts:

Don’t do this and don’t do that.

Don’t touch the hot stove.

Don’t run out in the street.

Don’t hit your brother.

Don’t color on the walls.

Don’t throw the ball in the house.

Don’t jump on the furniture.

Don’t wave the stick around.

Don’t poke your sister with it.

Don’t you know you can poke her eye out?

Don’t run with scissors.

Boy that one sure brought an instant smile to my face when I first saw the ad for the T-shirt that says: Runs with scissors!

All these boundaries!

All these limits!

Hey can’t I do anything and just have some fun?!

If you haven’t figured it out yet I call this the boundary phase.

When I was a child a lot of the boundaries I just wanted to test.

You can just see it in the little kids today. You tell them they can’t do something and they get that mischievous grin on their face and the next thing you know they’ve disappeared and later when you find them what are they doing?

That’s right…Exactly what you told them NOT to do.

Later on you learn that some of the boundaries are actually a good idea like when you burn your finger and there’s a sudden realization of OUCH that hurts.

They say curiosity killed the cat. Well it can nearly do the same for an inquisitive 2 year old who was told to stay away from the electrical outlets.

Yes you guessed it.

I had a shocking experience when I stuck a wet metal key I had just previously had in my mouth into an electrical outlet!

You can say I saw the light and never did that again.

What is it about life lessons that we seem to have this innate desire to want to learn so many things the most painful way?

Anyway back to the puzzle -So I find all these straight-edged pieces representing the border of the puzzle picture and begin fitting these pieces together.

So now I have the picture frame and I notice particular colors or distinctive markings and begin looking among…

But what about all those other ‘don’ts’ that you didn’t see or maybe more properly feel a result?

How are those limits or boundaries affecting you 10, 20, 30 or 40 years later?

Do you even remember all of them?

And now later in life we begin to learn that even though we don’t (oops there is that word again) necessarily like boundaries we may actually give ourselves some. Self-imposed limits to keep us out of some sort of situation that may lead to some sort of difficulty or trouble.

Did you know that there are entire books about how to set boundaries?

So there you are putting the straight-edged pieces together to form the boundary or outside edge of this puzzle and something is wrong.

Everything is going together nice and easy and then suddenly you have two pieces that don’t join together correctly. You look back to the table and sort through all the pieces again thinking for sure you must have missed one. But you don’t find any. Then you look in the box or on the floor and still no missing piece. You are a little frustrated and wonder whether or not your practical joker friend took one. But no one is around. It’s just you. You briefly ponder making the pieces fit by pounding two of the pieces together, but decide against that after all you are a person of integrity and you can’t do that, Can you?

No, so you then figure well I guess it’s OK I’ve got all but one piece of the border together leaving a gap.

So you ignore this little inconsistency and go on.

Next you begin paying close attention to the colors, markings or anything distinctive along the border pieces that you’ve just put together or on the remaining big spread out puzzle pieces.

You quickly notice several pieces that all look very similar and yes you were right they form a portion of a picture and they actually fit together.

You may look at the box now for the picture of what the finished picture is supposed to look like.

But what do you do IF there is no picture?

Isn’t that like your life?

You’ve put some pieces together in this area of your life or that area and you may have had an idea once on what you thought your life was supposed to look like.

But maybe that was a long time ago when you were still a child and you had all these hopes and dreams and life seemed so simple then.

But now…
But now…
But now time has moved on and things have changed and what was once thought to be simple is not any longer.

What do you do now?

Is there a place to go to find missing pieces…like that practical joker friend who may have hidden them from view?

What if a piece got eaten by the dog or fell on the floor and scooped up by the vacuum cleaner.

What do you do when the pieces are no longer there? And these aren’t pieces just to a jig saw puzzle but your life?

Isn’t that what happens to so many of us along this journey we call life?

What do you do?