When going through any experience, how do you define it? Usually when someone is telling a story, they tell it chronologically; it began one way, and then some other stuff happened, and then it ended. The thing is, we don't usually acknowledge a timeline until everything is already over. You don't know something has started until you're in it, and you don't know when it's over until you're already out of it. You don't know how close the end is, or when the next corner will be, or when everything will all be ok.
I like to say that reality doesn't really exist, because everything is so subjective and perception is an individual's experience, but maybe that's not right either. Maybe reality exists, it's just like a puzzle. You see, there's one big picture, but each of us only sees one piece at a time, or a cluster of pieces. Usually we don't even see the same pieces at the same times as those around us-I don't know if you noticed that.
Life is no 500 piece puzzle either, it's at least a 2,500 piece monster of a puzzle, there's no other explanation. I can start off with a bunch of blue and some white and brown, and I can guess that it's a water scene, and it would be a pretty good guess.
Come to find out, the white and brown made up a boat, so now I have a sailboat in some water. I can keep working on the puzzle, and low and behold, it's actually a harbor; at the beginning I could guess by certain clues and colors that there would be water, but for all I knew at the beginning, I could have ended up with a fish tank or a deep sea ocean scene. Because I am referring to life and not a literal puzzle, we can assume there is no picture on the box you can use to see what the big picture is ahead of time. As I work on this puzzle, any number of things could pop up and I wouldn't know until it's in front of me.
Like many of my blog posts, this says a whole lot about perspective and not jumping to conclusions based on the information you have so far. You just never know what you'll get in the future that will change the entire picture. Not many things in life actually seem to make sense. What does make sense is that nothing will make sense if you don't have the entire picture. I try to remind myself of that whenever I feel like I'm running into a wall with a person or situation; if I had the whole picture in front of me it would make sense.
Now, instead of asking myself why, I ask myself, what is missing? What do I need to see or add, notice or realize, for everything to finish coming together to aid in my understanding. When everything is bad, nothing makes sense, so that must mean there's quite a bit missing from that picture-if you think about it like that, experiencing even hardships gets a little more exciting. I have to keep waiting for the next puzzle piece to figure out whatever I need to figure out, which in itself is surprisingly motivating. Today is a shorter blog post. Today, I am simply thankful for puzzles.
Until Next Time,
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