Life is like a Puzzle

I’m not the biggest fan of puzzles. If I do them myself, I take my time and follow the boring typical western way of doing in, slowly look at the pieces until I find the edge pieces. Then, even slower, start piecing together the middle until it’s done. And that is if I even finish the puzzle, because many times by then I get bored or I get frustrated because it’s difficult.

In addition, I can’t finish a puzzle unless I have the final picture to look at and work from.

But, when I do finish one, there is a giant sense of satisfaction that comes when you see the picture that you pieced together and knowing that you connected all those little parts to create one complete picture.

Sometimes though, I think about puzzles and how much like life they are. Think about it for a second. There are many things in our life that start out a jumbled mess and whether working alone with with others we start to piece everything together until it starts to look like what we want it to.

But unlike most puzzles, we don’t always know what the finish product will look like. We sometimes expect we should see the whole picture from the beginning. We expect this so much that often times we don’t even get started because of this.

It’s like we should know how every moment fits into when we first see it. But this handcuffs us. This stops us from even starting, and as a result we miss out on so much or we never piece together important moments in our life.

Life is like a puzzle, except with no finished picture to build from. That doesn’t mean we can’t start to piece together the puzzle that is our life without knowing what it looks like. That’s the joy in life, not knowing where everything leads. We don’t know what our life will look like when it’s finished, we don’t know how people and experiences fit together until it’s already past. And like a puzzle, sometimes the picture doesn’t start to become clear until we start fitting those pieces together – and not until then!

It would be like reading a mystery novel when you already know the answer, or watching a thriller film when we already know the twist, life isn’t meant to be enjoyed that way. You may not know what it is supposed to look like from the beginning, but that just means that the final picture can only be known when we put everything together.

So start fitting pieces together. Look back and make the connections, put them together and you’ll start to see the masterpiece of your life.