Finding piece* in the puzzle of life (*pun intended)

We often find ourselves stuck in a persistent, distressing situation where we can’t seem to find a way out: a job that we don’t like but where we feel stuck because we need to pay the bills, a relationship that makes us unhappy but where we’re stuck for some emotional constraint, a life where we’re struggling looking for meaning. We can find a way out of these distressing situations by changing the story we’re telling ourselves about them, by telling ourselves a more empowering story. (If you’re interested in understanding more about this mechanism of our mind, watch this beautiful TED Talk by Lori Gottlieb: How changing your story can change your life.)

Anna, a student who kindly and enthusiastically agreed to let me mention her name and quote parts of her words, just shared her new, more empowering story about life and meaning.

If this is the story you tell yourself about your place in the world, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve already found your purpose or not: you can live in peace and confidence, with the awareness that you have one and it will find you.

“You can imagine people in life as pieces of a big puzzle. Like a nice picture of a mountain, with green grass, trees, brown mountains, white mountains with snow and the blue sky.

“Each of us is a piece of this puzzle, but you don’t know it at the beginning. You are just a piece of it, you have your own characteristics, you may be blue or green. You have a specific place in the puzzle, unique, and without you, the picture will have a hole. Somehow you are needed.

“But often we don’t know our place, we don’t even know in which part of the picture we can start to put ourselves to find other pieces that match with us. We may be blue, fully blue and decide that we like better being among brown pieces. We try to find a match to fit in that part of the picture, we try one thousand times… but no way, it doesn’t work. We start thinking that being blue is not a good thing, we would like to be brown, we try to fit at least with shape, if we can’t change our own colour… Stuck in that situation we think that the only place for us is “out of the picture,” so we hide under the carpet.

“One day something or someone allows us to look at the whole picture on the top of the box and we understand that we belong to the sky, and that the sky is in another part of the picture. So, we leave where we have spent all our time and move. We still don’t know where our place is, which pieces we may match with, maybe we are the first piece in that zone. As other blue pieces arrive, we still need to find our “shape match,” but at least we are in the right area. We could also be the last piece, and see an empty place ready, waiting for us… And when we step in, the sky is complete.”

So many real-life situations in Anna’s story, such as, when we try to conform where we don’t belong; when we try to look/behave/be like others; or when we hide from the world because we feel we don’t fit in.

So many real-life situations where we feel stuck, and one new, more empowering story to unstick us.

A piece of the puzzle may not know its place at the beginning, but it knows it does have a place in the big picture. It can live its life in anxiety, until it finds its place, or it can live in peace and confidence, with the awareness that its place is there somewhere.

Not only that. Some pieces may have brighter colours than others, some may have a more elegant shape, some may look shinier, but no puzzle is complete unless all its pieces are in place.

Every piece is needed.

And imagine being the last piece that finds its place in the puzzle... It had to wait a long time but, wow, imagine the joy of completing the whole puzzle!

Can you think of yourself and your life that way? Can you decide to trust the world that you have a role to play, a place to fit in, in the bigger puzzle of life? And then let the world show you where that place is?

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