Thursday is my birthday. On that day, I will be firmly embedded
within my fourth decade, a thought that causes me to age with every firing
synapse: old, old, old. As I approach this
birthday, I have begun to reflect upon the different periods of my history, and
how they have locked together in the untidy muddle of Me that I have
created. My Etch-A-Sketch lines are
messy and indistinct, and as I cogitate on the years I see just how frequently
I’ve been turned over, shaken, and wiped mostly clean, the ghost of previous
lines remaining, hairline fractures of the fragile eggshell in which I live: a
map of the jigsaw lines of my life.
As little as five years ago, I had different values and
goals – some of which I’ve met, and some I haven’t. I had different friends. I
lived in a different place, with different expectations, and struggled with
different weaknesses. Few of the things I valued then do I still value now. I
can’t even remember why they were important to me then, and I care little to
think too hard on them, but they cling to me still, vestiges of a past almost
forgotten. They are a collection of vague and colorless memories that float
around like specks of dust in a ray of sunlight.
I am veiled by these scraps of my past. I am too close to
them to see clearly how they’ve affected me, but I know I’ve changed by my
measurement of the changes in others. It’s extraordinary to observe people I
knew as teenage potheads transform into lawyers and mothers and NGO
volunteers. It’s almost incomprehensible to witness valedictorians and
full-ride scholars dropping out of school and leaving jobs with drinking
problems, drug addictions, and complete expiry of all motivation. I rejoice with those who have made leaps and
bounds into their better futures, shrug my shoulders when those people who have
always been superstars accomplish yet another amazing feat, but I cannot wrap
my mind around the people who have fallen so far. How can they have changed so
much? Do they not feel the loss of their ideals and dreams? And then, I think
back over the changes I’ve undergone, and I wonder: am I the kind of person at whom you shrug your
shoulders, because you have always expected me to achieve what I have, or am I
the kind at which people gape, rubber-necking at the train-wreck I’ve made of
my life?
Life isn’t, as so many believe, abstract, pointless, or
purposeless. There is an image in
there somewhere, probably obscured by multiple erasures and heavy lines and
scribbles of confusion and circles back and away from the same temptations that
kept us from adding depth to the true picture, leaving us flat and feeling
incomplete.
In the jigsaw life, all the pieces have a place, though
different in shape and size and color. You may struggle with a piece, wondering
where it belongs and how much attention you should pay to it before realizing
it has a flat edge and belongs on the outer periphery. Some pieces you try to
force in, but in the end you become aware that they belong to someone else’s
puzzle and not to your own at all. And so often we think we are working on the
whole picture, but we’ve become narrow and focused on making a single piece
perfect, not realizing that while our backs are turned, all the other pieces
are loosening and falling out. We forget
that there is no such thing as done,
that we have to keep working on all the same pieces we’ve been working on for
the entirety of our lives so that the lines match up when the pieces abut. We
might not be aware that we’re screwing up while we’re doing it, that our
flailing hands and arms are smashing to bits pieces that were perfectly
positioned. Worse, sometimes we do
know we’re spoiling it, but we don’t pay attention because it seems like such a
small piece that’s being sullied, an outside piece, an unimportant piece. Come
to discover later, that was a cornerstone piece, which had been keeping the
chaos under control.
And then there are the ugly pieces. Weird shapes and bilious
colors and aggressively frightening outlines that darken the picture and
distort it until it is almost unrecognizable. Pieces that are so worn thin that
they are frail and weak and threatening to collapse, compromising the existence
and stability of sound pieces, endangering them with the menace of falling into
the dark abyss of absence and loss. We try to get rid of these pieces only to
find that we cannot separate ourselves from them. They are inextricably
intertwined into the fabric of our self hood, their rooty tendrils latched onto
so many other bits so that if we force one out, they will all go down together.
And so we try to camouflage them, to cover them with other pieces, to paint over
them with better colors. The more we do this, the more slipshod and bungled our
puzzle becomes.
In the blessing of hindsight, we see that nobody’s puzzle is
a perfect square. Our puzzles are better than some, and some are
three-dimensional morsels of magic and luck that we covet from afar. In
hindsight we can see clearly the mess we made on our life’s canvas, as if we
were painting in the dark. The colors are wrong, the lines are a mess, and in
some places you can’t even see a picture at all. But the beauty of the jigsaw
life is its morphology. You can never
be finished while you are alive, and so you can never be a failure. Sometimes
you can’t choose which pieces come into your life or the effect these new
pieces have on the overall image. The morphology may be out of your control but
you can always choose how to fit the pieces in. You can keep searching for new
things to put into the puzzle to make it richer. You can keep throwing things
out to make it simpler. You can borrow
pieces from others until you find your own; you can pick and choose shapes to
fit in. Spouse shapes, art shapes, starlight walk shapes,
flying-kites-at-the-beach-instead-of-going-to-work shapes. They grow and shift
and nothing stays in the same place; pieces that used to be front and center
get moved to the side, their absences refilled with baby-shaped pieces,
job-shaped pieces, and short-term marathon training-shaped pieces. The outer
edges aren’t as clear cut as we think they should be, and though we often kick
pieces out and attribute them to other, less important side puzzles, there is
always one more, just one more piece missing. Just one thing that will make us better,
just one more thing we need to be our best. And this is as it should be.
The Spouse-shaped piece.
© Heidi Tauschek 2012
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I like the spouse-shaped, cornerstone piece. Beautifully written, my Love. Kind of made me want to cry and then just as I was beginning to feel too forlorn, you brought me back :)
ReplyDelete"In the jigsaw life, all the pieces have a place, though different in shape and size and color." A more apt analogy, I've not come across.
Heidi, what a great written analogy of our lifes as jigsaw puzzles! I enjoyed all the different ways you took the reader to view life. I especially liked, "You can never be finished while you are alive, and so you can never be a failure". As long as God gives you a new day to live, He will help you put the pieces together. I also like the spouse-shaped piece too! :) Mama B
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