Life is Like a Jigsaw Puzzle

Several weekends ago I had taken a trip out of Dodge to attend a Leadership Conference for our Business Women's Group. It usually consists of various speakers and words of wisdom to hopeful change your thinking about things to enhance your life.

With my A type personality it usually is very difficult for me to admit my shortcomings although I seem to be doing better as I get older (I hope).

One interesting exercise in personal growth included a jigsaw puzzle. One of the first questions that the speaker asked was whether we had ever done a jigsaw puzzle without looking at the picture first. Such a wonderful question, and it actually got me thinking. No never in my life had I done that. It reminded me a little about a game I played called Concentration. You turned all the pieces over with pictures not showing and proceeded to turn two at a time to match as sets. The object was to see how fast you could match all of them up.

Part of the object to me of putting together a puzzle has always been to get an idea of what the picture is and to start with the outer part of the puzzle and work you way to the middle, thus finishing the puzzle.

To me doing a puzzle without looking at the picture is like putting something together without looking at the directions. But in life you don't always have directions. Sometimes you have to make up your own directions or just experience the situation first hand in your own way. Sometimes it is not always the best way but for each individual it can be the right way.

After doing many puzzles as a kid if the picture was one I really liked or if it was a really difficult one I would usually buy puzzle glue and forever seal its fate and use it as a picture. Now that I look back at that it probably wasn't the best thing to do except that it was forever locked into place and hung on the wall to enjoy.

After the completion of the exercise many of us at our table considered trying to do a puzzle next time without looking at the picture. I believe I would try a small puzzle rather than a 1,000 piece one just to be on the safe side in hopes of completing it easily. As in life sometimes we want to take the easy way instead I guess.

We also got to choice two pieces of the puzzle at our table, picture down, that had a little saying on the other side. How fitting the two I choice were:

"Be grateful for pieces of life's puzzles that fit" and "Expect there to be missing pieces and learn to live with them". Two very fitting quotes that really do describe something that needed to be a reminder to be.