Have you ever done a jigsaw puzzle? If you have, you know that the pieces are small, cut from a larger form, and sometimes infuriatingly difficult to piece together. However, when they do come together, what had been separate pieces becomes a unity of color/shape/design that brings something bigger to life that holds together through its interlocking parts.
I sometimes do jigsaw puzzles for relaxation, and as I was piecing together a fairly easy one, I noted that while I was focused on one piece, my full attention was there – scanning and searching for just the right “fit”…the place where it belonged. Once found, there was a momentary feeling of “Aha!” and then it was as though that piece never existed. I was off to the next, and the next.
I noticed something else about the jigsaw puzzle. When you look at a piece, isolated from the rest, most of the time you have absolutely no idea what it represents. Sometimes you have to find location by color shading, other times by line value. Sometimes it’s by pure guesswork and attrition. The harder pieces have to wait. You deal with them toward the end.
As I noted in the beginning, once the picture is formed, each piece takes on more significance. You can see what part it played in the overall context. Yet, while in the finding stage, significance is not always easy to determine. And so our lives. We start out in trial and error mode, forging together loose pieces of what we are becoming within a context that doesn’t always make sense or have easily identified markers. It takes time to put us together – to see ourselves in a larger light. And so, it takes patience to become the complete picture of you or me. We can’t rush it, but need to take each moment to relish the experience of each piece as we pull them together. We are becoming – we’re in process. That’s the puzzle, and it’s also the reward."