I just started working a 1,000 piece puzzle to help me pass the many hours that I spend lying around the house. Good puzzles are hard to find but I can usually count on the local Hallmark store to carry a few that look challenging and fun. I find that people either hate to work puzzles or love them but I’ve never heard anyone say that they kind of like them. I’m on the love side and always have been. The thing I like about a puzzle is that there is only one right answer for every spot you’re trying to fill. You can’t pick up one piece and say that it’s close so I’m going to make it work. You have to put it down and keep searching for that one right piece and when you find it, it’s a tiny little feeling of success.
Too bad life isn’t that way. Or maybe it is and we just keep trying to force wrong answers into spaces where they don’t belong. Are we just too lazy to keep searching for all the right answers in life and so we settle for something that’s close and decide that it’s easier to force it then it keep searching? Or, is life a lot more complicated then a puzzle and there is more than one right answer to each and every problem we’re dealt?
I know with my cancer treatments I was faced with making a lot of the decisions myself about what to do, when to do it and who to do it with. I was tormented trying to gain enough knowledge to feel like I could make the “right” decision. I might not know for years if I did make the right decisions or if I just got worn down and started forcing some answers to get the ball rolling. The thing that I do know is that once you finally decide what you’re going to do; life has a way of falling into place. I suppose if life were as rigid as a puzzle we would all be running around desperately searching for each and every right answer because getting it wrong would just not work. So I think we need to celebrate the tiny successes in life when it feels like we found that right piece to solve the current puzzle we each are dealing with even if the answer hasn’t yet been revealed.
