When pieces of life’s puzzle don’t add up, it can completely throw us into a whirlpool of confusion and doubt. All that we thought we knew shrivels up and doubt hardens the remains into unrecognizable pulp. So how else do we complete the puzzle? Share your load perhaps, as the more eyes and minds at work the better picture created of what is missing and what is there.
People deal with their problems differently, they handle situations differently, the respond differently. It’s what makes us who we are, and what we become. Life shapes us with experience, whilst decision and responsibility chisel away slowly at our childhood selves, revealing an older and seemingly wiser person that although may be just as lost and scared of the world as that child that was hidden within, is now more capable of seeing life in a new light and even change it, given the knowledge we’ve acquired. The good, the bad and the things that make absolute no sense. A lot of us looked forward to growing up, yearning freedom and opportunity. Yet now, when the time has come, we would give anything to stay a kid, where the world revolved around what was on Cheese TV, where you worried about nothing except who was ‘it’ during recess games of tag, where you could so easily forgive and forget and when such simplistic things could make you smile all day. But time is fleeting yet eternal. Things change, people move on, life continues. Nothing lasts as much as we hope it will. However, life is how you perceive it. It is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you deal with it.
The sight of a sunset can still calm you, the sounds of laughter, a smile from a stranger; they can all still make you smile. Life doesn’t lose its magic as we leave our childhood fantasies, it is merely hidden and shrouded in .TRUE magic needs to be searched and treasured when found, but needs to be let go when required. Never think that life is not miraculous. Sometimes it just needs a little bit of wonder, a little bit of hope, a little bit of speculation, a little bit of yearning and effort to find it. But once you have, it can restore your faith in this reality of the real ‘adult’ world. In time, we may even be able to find such magic moments as easily as we do texting a friend, or daydreaming during a lecture.
Given so much to grasp and grapple with at our age, for it’s a time when we try so desperately to hold onto our past whilst being thrust into our future, it’s no wonder many of us live in a state of confusion. But slowly, and surely, with more pieces of the puzzle we find, the complexity of life emerges and although we cannot go back, something (is it a sense of responsibility? Curiosity? Awe?) drives us to continue this never ending enigma.
Maybe finishing the puzzle isn’t the point, since we all know that sometimes the more pieces we find, the more gaps emerge. Maybe, we try so hard to not only hold onto the hope of finally seeing the finished product and finding some sense, but to learn how fit the pieces together.