Life's Puzzle

 Life can get challenging sometimes.  It can feel like things just don't go together.  I know often I can feel like I am constantly working for a goal or many goals, and while I am feeling super productive, nothing ever seems to be finished.  Everything seems to be a neverending project where the finish line seems to be moving further and further away.  Ever feel this way?  I do all the time. 

For some reason, at the end of this summer I got a card table out in our front room.  I found a puzzle that I had put away in my office since I had received it.  I got my kids together at the card table and I broke open the seal of the puzzle box and dumped out all the pieces on the table...all 1000 of them!  Probably not best practice for a family of two teachers and two students, but I did it.  

We followed the typical puzzle procedure, at least procedure in our house, of flipping all the pieces up and separating edge pieces from the middle pieces.  Then we assemble the border while sorting the middle pieces by similar color and so on.  The border came together slowly, but we hit a snag with three edge pieces left and seemingly nowhere they belonged, and there were a couple breaks in the edge that none of these remaining pieces fit.  Ugh.  It was suggested by someone in the house that we quit. Well, we moved on to start assembling some small images that were easy to find and fit together.  There was a burst of accomplishment, but the overall picture was a long way off.  I started to feel like I do in life sometimes.  Some of the pieces were coming together, but the overall goal was way off.  Every time we stopped for 5 minutes to work on the puzzle, we were productive but we were getting edgy as the school year/deadline was approaching, and the end was way off.  

It was at this point that I realized this is how I feel a lot of the time at work or with workouts or house projects or relationships.  We hit snags where things just don't seem to connect.  Even the little successes that come together are hard to see how they fit together with the larger picture.  It gets frustrating.  

But if we stick with it, the small successes start to come together, and before we know it, the larger picture begins to become apparent.  It is a good lesson for me and maybe it is a good reminder to all of us.  When things don't seem to be coming together and we can't see the "big picture" in life, remember that last puzzle you did.  Remember how sticking with it and appreciating the small accomplishments along the way help to bring the satisfaction of completing a goal.