“Our whole life is solving puzzles.”

— Erno Rubik

Life is a series of puzzles.

At first, a life project is just a bunch of pieces jumbled together in a box. You can visualize a rough frame by putting the straight edges together. Once the frame is in place, you know the scope. Then you fill in the middle, starting with some easily recognizable patterns. After you’ve put all the easy stuff together, you start randomly trying pieces on the vague parts. Eventually, there aren’t too many pieces left and you can really move fast. Then you’re done.

A few places you can go astray.

• If you’re not working toward finishing the puzzle, you may be just moving pieces around.
• At the beginning, progress is slow. Don’t be deterred.
• Not setting the boundaries makes it easy to get off task.
• Keep your puzzles separate. Mixing up the pieces can be chaos.
• Not keeping an eye on the puzzle box can lead to a lot of wasted effort.

Where does giving come in?

• You can help people find missing pieces to their puzzle.
• Often they will have pieces you are missing.
• Together, you can solve much larger puzzles.
• Putting a puzzle together with someone is so much more fun.

Life is a series of puzzles. Individually, small ones are possible. Together, there’s no limit to how big a puzzle we can solve.

With my family and several others, I’m putting together the puzzle of our Christmas dinner for the families at the Tigard Good Neighbor Center.