One of my favourite things to do is work on a jigsaw puzzle. I have a mind that loves figuring things out, so for me it’s relaxing to just sit and allow my mind to dance about figuring where things should go.
Whilst puzzling recently, I had a clear insight that the right piece in the wrong place isn't the right piece, even when it looks like it is or should be. The right piece in the wrong place will never fit right.
That may sound completely obvious, but when we take this as an analogy for life, then it becomes curious.
The insight that I had related, in part, to a friend who was having a dilemma of a situation they were in not feeling right, but logically, the thing that didn’t feel right was a good solution. Right piece, wrong place. No matter how she tussled with the logical good solution, it was never going to fit as it wasn’t the right piece for her life at that time.
In exploring this further, another friend shared how they’d been struggling with feeling unfulfilled. They were between jobs and they thought the right piece they needed was to find another permanent job.
What the right piece ended up looking like was something quite different. For them, it was a deepening of their understanding of life and adventuring into new ideas of how they could be more fulfilled. They currently don’t have a permanent job, but now it doesn’t feel like an urgent necessity. The missing piece was the feeling rather than a specific something.
I think that’s true for a lot of us. Something that looks like the right answer may or may not be, but if it’s in the wrong place, it never will be.
You can enjoy the adventure as you explore where the pieces fit, and also know there is no shame in finding a particular piece that doesn’t fit in the current place of the puzzle of your life that you’re at.
I’m off back to my puzzle to give my mind something to chew on and allow my awareness to take flight.