Someone wrote a plea for pity and sympathy on social media using "bad" words to equate life with a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces keep getting knocked off the table by a "jerk".
It touched a nerve. I am always suspect of people who over react in public and I don't really care for the way this person expressed herself this time, but I do like the analogy.
In my long years of living, and yes I am old, I have discovered that life is indeed like a puzzle, The Neverending Puzzle that is constantly being knocked off the table by one thing or another.
Just about the time I think it is taking shape, I discover that it is a two sided puzzle and I have some of the pieces upside down. While I am sorting that out, I realize that this puzzle isn't the huge happy family one with familiar faces, but the family of the heart one filled with people who don't know each other and whose only connection is knowing me. Then I find more pieces on the floor and when I fit them in, I see this is really a puzzle about love and how hard it is to love real people with real feelings and real needs and not just pretty smiles on a box lid.
People are always knocking pieces off the table and maybe that is an important part of life. Kind of like Shiva dancing away the old moments to make way for the new, or clearing the air to make way for new ideas. Destruction opens the way for reconstruction.
Everyone needs to find his or her own way of coping with these "jerks". One of my favorites is a line from Fiddler On The Roof where Tevye asks the Rabbi if there is a proper blessing for the Czar and he responds, "May God bless and keep him -- far away from us."
It acknowledges our actual inability to really effect change for anyone except for ourselves. Railing against the Czar doesn't hurt him at all, but it sure does mess up my life. It's better for me if I just keep putting that puzzle together and finding ways to get lost in the beauty and intricacies of this piece or that.
The big picture is probably beyond my comprehension.
No comments:
Post a Comment