Puzzle Pieces

I see our lives as gigantic puzzles. Some sections are completed and behind us, and others have the pieces scattered every which way, and you have no idea how the picture will look when it's all pieced together. This is where age and maturity makes a big impact. You can see some sections coming together, and remember how frustrating it was to find the pieces that fit together, but how satisfying it felt to hear them snap into place.

There are mini-pictures which make up the bigger image in the puzzle. A face appears, or a lake or road, and what made no sense to you before now appears recognizable. I've been doing this with my childhood. Things happen to each of us, and we have to put it into some kind of perspective so we can understand it. Then the picture begins to emerge, and we can use what we learn in other areas of our lives.

I feel like a lot of my loose and damaged puzzle pieces are coming together this summer and forming a picture which is useful to me. It's a quiet and peaceful process, well received after the stormy season which proceeded it. The chaos is always hard to manage, but when the pieces slot into place, there is a calm which descends, and your own life makes sense to you again, but in an entirely new way.

Courage is required to see this process through. There are many times I wanted to stop in the middle, because that's always what I've done before. When the going got really hard, I tended to burrow back into my comfortably dark hole and stop the work of digging toward the light. This past year I went back to counseling and found the support and encouragement I needed to continue. I didn't want to stay stuck where I was. I wanted to push through, and it was at once the hardest and the best thing I've ever done.

It's by no means done, but I'm hoping that the hardest parts of this particular section of my puzzle have been completed. The scary ghosts in the closet are not as frightening with the full light of day shining on them. The secrets have been forced out into the open, and defining what had been secret for so long has liberated me.

Writing has been my saviour this year. It has provided a place for me to shuffle these pieces around until they made sense and could be connected together. One piece needs the next, and the next, in order to complete the mini-picture. Feeling the joy of seeing it come together has brought me peace, and I'm incredibly grateful I didn't quit at the lowest point.

Perseverance is a tremendous gift. Simply walking with one foot in front of the other when we would rather lie down in the fetal position builds our character. If we want to teach these life skills to our kids, it's better to live them out ourselves. Talk is cheap. Action is everything.

This seems like a suitable place to thank you once again for reading. If you read every day and you haven't taken the time to create a Google account with a name and e-mail address, please do, so I have some idea how many people are reading regularly. It also means so much for me to hear from you in the comments or on my Facebook writing page if something you read has touched you, moved you, or even if you heartily disagree with me! Anytime you pass along my site to a friend, I'm so grateful as I'm trying to grow my readers.

Thank you for your support. The words are too small to express how I feel, but there are only so many words for gratitude. You've made sections of my puzzle come together into sharp focus since I began this blogging experiment, and without readers, I would've been simply writing these thoughts in my own journal, and not widening the circle to include others. Thank you for reading, commenting and sharing my writing with others. Thank you for being part of my personal puzzle.