Life as a jigsaw puzzle…

Have you ever put a jigsaw puzzle together? It doesn’t really matter if it was 10 pieces or 10,000 pieces. When all the pieces were in their correct places you had a picture. That’s just the way they work.

This last month my sister and I put together a fun puzzle together called Bizarre Library. See below.

It was both fun AND bizarre! (actually all-engrossing as well!)

And, as I love obscure analogies, I ask you to bear with me as I play with this one!

Imagine looking at your puzzle picture when you’ve got it all together and deciding that you didn’t like it so you take the whole thing apart. Or maybe you liked a little part of the picture so you kept it together, but disassembled everything else.

Here’s the part where I get super ridiculous…

To get a new picture, one you think you’ll be happier with, you take all of the pieces you just tore apart and begin putting them back together. In fact, you try putting some of them together differently than you had them before. Same pieces, different places.

Seems silly doesn’t it? How on earth can you expect to get a different picture from the exact same pieces that formed a picture you didn’t like? You can’t.

Why do I bring this up? Because we do it every day when we are approaching our life changes.

It reminds me of the ever-meaningful quote:

And I think this happens because we have a scarcity mentality, one that tells us that what we have is all we’ll ever have. Therefore, whatever we want has to be built with the stuff on hand. Wrong.

We want to reshape our current picture instead of starting fresh and creating a picture of what we REALLY want. Backward thinking.

Some ideas to help solve this jigsaw puzzle approach to life:

1. Don’t tear the current picture apart. This may seem counter-intuitive, but hang in here with me. What we want is to go some place new, a brand new picture. In order to go somewhere new, we have to know where we are now. Our current picture serves as our starting point, so we keep it together for clarity.
2. Take a mental trip with no baggage. We set aside our current circumstances and limitations and envision the way we want life to be. We can have fun with the possibilities.
3. Map out our trip. Using the current picture, we begin mapping out our steps. If where I am is ‘A’ and where I want to go is ‘Z’ then we simply start the planning.
4. Get started. This obvious (yet most overlooked step) to life changes is the most basic. Stacks of books and hours of seminars do nothing unless WE do something! If we’re at ‘A’ on our way to ‘Z’ we don’t want to get caught up in how we’ll take all the steps from T to W…take step B. One at a time gets us there.

If the pieces we are using right now don’t form the picture of life we want, we need to change the pieces. Perhaps not all at once, but systematically, with a plan in front of us. This is not complicated, but it does require commitment.

Is the picture you have one you want?

Is the picture you want worth the effort?

Are you working on changing anything?

Tags: change, jigsaw puzzle