Fitting the Puzzle

“There are no extra pieces in the universe. Everyone is here because he or she has a place to fill, and every piece must fit itself into the big jigsaw puzzle.” ~ Deepak Chopra


Of all virtues a human can have, patience is certainly one I never mastered. For that reason mostly, I’ve never been a fan of jigsaw puzzles. Last night we decided to have fast food for dinner, and my daughter found a puzzle as prize in her happy meal bag. As soon as we got home, she opened the small bag and poured the puzzle pieces onto the table. Then, she looked at me with big, disarming eyes and said: “Mom, can you help me with this?”

I was trapped. With dad still at work and teenage brothers busy talking on the phone and playing on the computer, I could see no way out. I drew a silent deep breath and tried my best to smile excitedly, while my daughter, oblivious to the truth painted on my face, gingerly got the pieces ready.

Finding the corner pieces was the easy part; next – I remember hearing from my husband once, while he worked on one of the wretched things with one of the children – we had to find the “outside” pieces with straight sides. Check. After a little while we identified those pieces too. Now the real fun was about to start…fitting the middle pieces that always appear to go everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Since the visual skills of my five-year-old daughter are with no doubt superior to mine – and also because with a good compliment I could buy my way out of puzzle-hell - I encouraged her to try on her own. Not only was my idea a sudden burst of geniality getting me out of a hot spot, but watching my daughter solve the puzzle from a distance also taught me a thing or two about the way we fit, or don’t seem to, in the greater puzzle of life.

The first thing she did was to rotate the pieces to see if they would interlock with the ones already laid out. When more than one piece seemed to fit, she matched colors at the edges to discern the right one from the wrong ones.

A thought suddenly fluttered through my mind…could it be that when we feel we don’t fit we are just not properly “rotated” and are looking at things from the wrong direction? Surely, if we turned the puzzle pieces facing the other way they would no longer fit. Similarly, we often look at things from a faulty perspective; we can’t find our place, or look around to see lack of acceptance and judgment, because our focus is on what doesn’t matter. If we have to give a speech, write a piece, or introduce ourselves to the world, we worry more about what others are expecting to see than about what we have to offer. Someone once said that if we center our thoughts on what we are doing rather than on what others might think of it, then we will create something we can be proud of that will probably be favorably accepted by others.

Her second approach was also enlightening. We are, many times, given clues to help us ease into situations, but we often ignore them because our arrogance gets in the way. “This is the way I am,” I’ve heard someone say before, “if they can’t take me the way I am it’s their loss.” Well, it very well would be, if the person voicing out their unmoving position was content and not at all bothered by exclusion and social rejection. Everyone should be confident enough to be honest about who they are, but if what they show the world causes them to suffer, maybe a little adjustment or toning down is in order; expecting others to accept our dark side with open arms is no less pompous than forcing a people to say they love their dictator.

Each of us has a place in the greater scheme of things, and all of us are here to serve a purpose, whether our role is apparent or masked. Just a few days ago, I read somewhere that Hitler and the Dalai Lama were great teachers because they both moved people to compassion from opposite sides of the board. Even if it is a hard concept to swallow, I deeply believe that statement hides a great truth.

We might never find out what our purpose is, and maybe it is not even important we know. What IS important is that we recognize our value is much higher in the greater scheme of things than we will ever be able to perceive from our point of perspective.

A Love That Never Dies

“You taught me how to love; you taught me how to live; you taught me how to laugh; you taught me how to cry, but when you left, you forgot to teach me how to forget you.” ~ Hendie

Not too long ago, my mother was telling me about a friend of hers, Anita, who recently lost her husband after a long battle with cancer. She and her husband had been married for almost fifty years, and were only a few weeks shy of celebrating their anniversary. Theirs was a symbiotic relationship - their roles were defined and perfectly aligned, and worked together with the precision of a Swiss clock.

When her husband passed away, Anita was lost. Not only did she have to rely on her sons to take care of mundane matters - she told my mother - but also had to forgive herself for still being alive.

When someone we love suddenly leaves our lives, letting go of them feels like a betrayal. We hang on to pain as an invisible rope that keeps us connected to their essence, and feel that if we let go of the pain we will lose them completely. If we move on, and begin to live again, we feel guilty of leaving them behind, or, if they have chosen to leave willingly, we feel that by forgetting the pain we are condoning their acts.

Truth be said, what connects us to loved ones who are no longer with us is not pain, but the memories we have created over time. As long as we hold our loved ones in our hearts and minds, they will never be gone.

Regardless of how we have lost that person – through physical death or choice of a different path – we need to allow ourselves time to heal. In some Native American traditions, when someone leaves, a specific ritual is performed to “cut the ties that bind”. We establish energetic ties with all who cross our path and become important to us; when something happens to upset the connection the ties become a stranglehold, and stop both from moving forward. Cutting the emotional ties does in no way separate us from the beautiful moments that connected us to them, but only severs the need to hold on to pain.

Those of us who have any kind of spiritual affiliation know that all things happen for a reason. Maybe we had a soul agreement with that person to be in our lives only for a short while and teach us something about ourselves, or we may have something more we need to accomplish before we go while the other person had already fulfilled their life contract. We could drive ourselves mad searching for reasons that may not be for us to know. What counts is that the person we loved came into our lives and left something with us before they departed. Their gift to us may be one we might not readily see or understand, but it undoubtedly touched our lives and changed us in some way.

There is a season to seed and one to blossom; there is a season to ripen and one to harvest. There is a time to hope, to laugh and cry, but most of all, there is a time to be grateful for every chance we have to experience love.

Floating vs. Drowning

“Fear is faith that it won’t work out.” ~ Author unknown


While watching a comedy sitcom in which a kid was trying to learn how to swim, I saw my daughter become pensive for a moment. Then, with a puzzled look spreading across her little face, she said: “If I can swim, why is he having such a hard time with it? He can just float.”

I tried to remind her of when she didn’t know how to swim either, and how apprehensive she was when the swimming instructor first asked her to ‘let go’, but since that moment in her life was long past, she simply shrugged her shoulders and remarked that all the kid has to do is to let himself float.

Since there was no point in arguing her down - and also because she had a point somehow – I only told her that fear is what stops people from swimming, and adds pounds to their bodies making them a dead weight; since she is no longer scared, she can abandon herself to the water and float easily. That explanation didn’t really satisfy her never-ending curiosity, but her five-year-old attention span saved the day; she had enough of my “weird” explanations and happily trotted off the next room to play. On the contrary, my daughter’s simple question left me with a couple of points to ponder.

We readily assume that our reality is largely affected by facts that can be proven through physics or other scientific disciplines, but if one analyzes the water Morgan swims into, and the water the kid in the show fought with, there is really no chemical difference between the two. Just as well, the second kid’s struggle cannot be attributed to him being heavier than my daughter, as there are many people larger than him swimming like fish. In fact, body weight has little to do with staying afloat, since heavier people can at times float better because they displace more water. So what can possibly stop one kid from floating which doesn’t affect other people who know how to swim? The answer is a simple one…the kid who can’t float is just allowing is fear of drowning to overwhelm his natural ability to float on water because the focus of his faith is not in succeeding but in failing.

Swimming isn’t the only skill we forfeit because of fear, and every day we lose wonderful opportunities to grow and evolve because we are scared of the unknown facing us. We have faith that we can stand up and thrive on solid ground, and we have no trouble doing so, but we question our faith when it comes to dive into unfamiliar waters; similarly, we have faith that our lives will run smooth if we follow old, proven channels, but we have faith we will lose our stability if we think outside the box and take a risk.

To elaborate using a very recent example, I will share something else. My husband occasionally buys lottery tickets, and yesterday morning he asked me to check the numbers of his ticket online while one of our sons was in the kitchen eating breakfast; when he heard what his father asked, Michael mindlessly asked if we are ever going to win the lottery; without thinking twice, my husband replied no. I almost asked him why he bothered to even buy tickets if he already assumed that he is never going to win, but quickly dismissed the question and moved on with my day; I can assure you however, that until he can change the focus of his faith, you will never read on the paper that the Carrington-Smiths in Raleigh NC have won the Power Ball! Since he expects to not win, Universe has no choice but to indulge him.

Faith and confidence can carry a person on powerful ethereal wings, as long as one doesn’t decide to look down and mentally calculate the depth of the fall. So, in so many ways my daughter is completely right – if she can swim, so should everybody. As long as they can believe they can.