I have no idea what I'm going to write. No theme, no outline, no photo to direct my thoughts into one cohesive post. But I'm going to write anyway. It's been a while since I let my fingers do the talking. Let's see what they have to say.
I feel like I'm in a freefall right now. Parachute is not yet engaged, I don't see the ground, I'm just falling.
I'm looking for safety nets but unsure what to ask of them. I need to know they are there but I don't want to use them.
I feel like I'm falling from another galaxy, destination earth, ETA is six months but I don't have a map. I don't know what country I'm going to land in. Will I sink or swim when I get there?
Is there such a thing as a plan? I stopped planning years ago when life started doling out surprise detours on a rather regular basis. I could hear the snide voice inside my head snicker, "So you think you can plan, huh? Heh, heh, heh!"
Life is a puzzle. It starts out with about 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 pieces (or more). One by one, little pieces fall together.
As an infant, someone else is in control of finding all the edge pieces and creating some groundwork and boundaries.
As a toddler, you find a few fun, challenging and interesting parts of the puzzle and start putting together the easy parts.
Teen years? You start looking at other people's puzzles, try forcing your puzzle pieces to fit in.
Adulthood arrives and you only see a pile of pieces, not yet sorted into manageable colors and themes. The puzzle is overwhelming, so many choices, too much/too little direction. You are an adult. You should be able to figure out this puzzle of life and it may feel like you aren't ready. Or you feel like you are ready and you start off with the pieces that didn't fit in with the whole picture yet.
You start trying to fit yourself into someone else's puzzle. Find the connecting pieces. Find a way to fit in. You may abandon your own puzzle pieces altogether, as someone else's puzzle looks like a better fit. Mixing up multiple puzzles becomes an onerous task. It is only after multiple attempts, when you realize you have to work on your own puzzle, do the best with what you are given, accept and nurture what you have first, foremost and always.
Many a lifetimes are spent within our own lifetime, finding the right piece to make sense of the unfinished picture. We build up one part of our puzzle to discover there is so much more to decipher.
When we are fortunate, we find little bunches of "easy" pieces. The pictures our eyes pick out and focus on. Our passions.
Family is trickier. They are mixed in with all the zillions of puzzle pieces. They are familiar but they morph and grow and evolve over time so it's a challenge to find how those pieces fit into the puzzle of life.
Homes, jobs, teachers, bosses, bullies, caregivers, friends and all the supporting cast within your life. Some of those pieces are a one time event, others carry forward throughout your puzzle of life. A common thread, a theme, encouraging words, hurtful exchanges, tough learning experiences, heart ache and heart break. It's all there, mixed up in those trillions of pieces left to piece together.
The sky, the trees, the water - always there. Tough to decipher pieces that appear to be identical until we look at them close up and figure out how they fit into the entirety of our picture. Faith, health, inner peace, the air we breath in and out every day. All around us, invisible to the eye.
Each day, framed by the monotony of life - eating. sleeping, making the bed, cooking, working, caretaking, house and yard maintenance, paying the bills, cleaning the cat litter. The repetition, the necessity of the daily grind that is the structure and constant within the whole.
We spend our lifetime working on our puzzle. In search of a missing piece. Trying to fit in. Finding a piece we aren't ready for yet but not wanting to abandon it. The discovery that the piece that doesn't fit is from someone else's puzzle. Separating your parents/siblings/partners/children/friends puzzle pieces from your own, while incorporating a portion of their pieces into your picture. Attempting to visualize the entire picture.
Then comes a time when your pieces are dwindling. You know you have a finite amount of time to piece it all together. How do you make some pieces (safety/security, home, health, money) last as long as it takes before your puzzle is complete, when you have no idea how many pieces are left?
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