Have you ever watched a toddler do a puzzle? One of those chunky wooden ones?

It’s so funny as the child decides where he or she is putting the pieces, they don’t necessarily do it the way it should be done. They don’t follow the picture on the box, they don’t even match up the sides of the puzzle pieces, they just know it fits together somehow as they’ve seen others do it. So they cram the pieces in wherever they go, sometimes getting lucky and putting them in the right place and sometimes with massive concentration and determination they force a piece into a space it has no chance of fitting into, at least that’s what we think, but they manage it.

As an adult we can look at the whole picture, see the pieces that are in the wrong places as they stick out a mile and help them fix it.

Is it just me that this reminds of life in general? Our lives are just puzzles we are putting together piece by piece and we’re all that determined toddler doing it how we want it to be not how it should be.

We expect pieces to fit together and sometimes they do and sometimes they just don’t. We concentrate really hard and push them in and spend too much time on them, trying to make them fit into spaces they have no hope of fitting into when really we should realise it’s just not where they go and move on. Sometimes we all get so caught up convincing ourselves a piece goes somewhere that we refuse to consider it doesn’t and keep trying to squeeze it into the space we want it to fit into. Sometimes we need to stand back, take a break and think it might just go elsewhere.

It’s only after we’ve found the real place for it do we think, “Oh yeah, that’s why it never fit in over there!”

The good news is that all puzzles fit together eventually, we just need to remember if a piece is taking too long to fit together or is just not working out, it is not meant to be there.

There’s a place for it elsewhere. 🙂