Life is a puzzle. This thought resonates in my mind as I try to connect two puzzle pieces that clearly should fit; but they don’t. “Look! I did it!” shouts the seven-year-old, sitting in front of me, “I made the strawberry!” Sure enough, she had managed to find two pieces that fit, but their colors just didn’t match up. Knowing that trying to correct her would just end in tears, probably for both of us, I wait until she’s busy trying to connect some more strawberries and casually fix her mistake. Lisa continues to struggle with misplaced pieces and shadows that create the illusion that they simply cannot match up to her bright red strawberries. The look on her face and her frustrated sighs remind me of how I feel. trying to get the fragments of my life to connect.

I look up at the picture and look for a place where a pink flower is touching an orange flower and after getting distracted more than a few times, things finally start to click into place. My sister, always the quitter, has given up on her strawberries and moved on to a more simple puzzle, one with only a hundred pieces. “I did this one yesterday, all by my little self,” she brags. I find myself wishing life were more like that. When things get tough, I could just move on to a problem that I’ve solved before. But what fun would that be? I enjoy puzzles because they aren’t easy. Because they do make you think and figure things out for yourself.

When you’ve figured something out, whether a puzzle or a piece of your life, there’s always that huge sense of accomplishment, and you can finally say, “Look what I did. All by my little self.”