Building your Puzzle

A few years back, at the worst of my illness, it dawned on me that like is like a giant jigsaw puzzle. We spend our lives building our puzzle piece by piece. Finding the right job, getting married, having children. Each piece forming who we are, locking in to the piece next to it. As we get older the picture gets clearer and clearer until it all comes together in to this beautiful and wonderful life. We are content and happy. Life is good. Then one day, someone comes along and bumps the table and the pieces we have spent so long putting together go scattering in all directions. It is different for all of us. Job loss, death, divorce, disease. I'm sure you can put your own name to the situation. In my case it was Hashimoto's Thyroiditis. I spent a lot of time trying to pick up the pieces and put them back together again, to recreate that wonderful picture. But as we all know with any good puzzle, when we go back to rebuild there is usually a piece or two missing. Some days I look at that picture and see the beauty in it, missing pieces and all. I see how far I have come to putting it all back together. Some days I realize that sometimes we just need to set aside the old puzzle and start a new one. I know that someday, as I work on each piece and they come together, it will be a beautiful and whole picture. Different from the first but just as or maybe more beautiful than the first. When I look at it this way, the bad days don't seem so overwhelming. Some pieces just take more time to find where they fit. I wish you many joyful days of putting your puzzle together, may it be as beautiful as you expected.