All the Pieces

All the Pieces                    

By John W. Vander Velden

 

Life is not like putting together a scrapbook.  It’s not like filling a photo album either.  You see life doesn’t give us the ability to pick and choose what things we would like to include in our days.  No, life is more like a jig saw puzzle still in the box.  It is for us to take all the pieces and fit them together…

It takes all the pieces to complete a puzzle.  When all the pieces are arranged in their proper places we can see the whole picture.  In the winter of 1962 we returned to Indiana.  We found a puzzle in the house, left behind by those that had lived there before us.  I liked puzzles…then.  But my childhood puzzles had just a few large pieces and could be put together in a matter of minutes.  I remember the box, an image of a basket weaver surrounded by perhaps fifty examples of his work.  It must have contained 500 or more pieces, a challenge for any ten year old.  But worse, not all the pieces interlocked.  Many just butted against its neighbor with a wavy edge that matched no other.

I remember working for days, and as in all puzzles the more I assembled the easier it became.  But what “burst my bubble” was that three pieces were missing.  Now in the grand scheme of things what are three pieces out of 500?  Nada. I mean there was enough to see the whole of it.  But those three pieces left a hole…an incompleteness…

Perhaps I should have been pleased that I had found the “right” place for the 497 pieces.  That I had used my determination to finish a difficult task.  But in my mind it was not finished.  Those three missing pieces made completion impossible.  I never worked that puzzle again.  In truth, I have done very little puzzle work since the early months of 1962.

It seems to me that life is like a box of puzzle pieces.  And we are not allowed to pick and choose which pieces we will place on the table of our life.  The pieces that are sunny days and happy times are mixed in with other pieces we would choose to avoid.  But it takes all the pieces to finish the thing we call life.  It takes the dark days as well as the bright.  It takes the difficult times as well as the easy.  It takes sadness to contrast with the happy parts of our living.

So on those days when I face frightening dark painful times, times of illness, times of loss, all those days I would wish I could place in the box and forget, I will do my best to remember that I cannot.  For life takes all of the pieces…and I must go on.  (470 Words)  1-8-2018