Sometimes life lessons come in the most unexpected places such as while one is cussing their way through completing a puzzle. As part of my continued cognitive rehabilitation, my occupational therapist recommended I do puzzles. Supposedly the puzzles are supposed to help with my visual spatial deficit, my attention and focus issues, and help my brain build new neural pathways. So far I think the only skill that doing puzzles has improved is the frequency of curse words flying out of my mouth. I didn’t enjoy puzzles in my life BLC( Before Long Covid), so I certainly don’t enjoy them now when my brain gets easily fatigued trying to fit tiny pieces together to make a picture.

Last week I completed a 60 piece Toy Story puzzle, which was yet another humbling moment on this journey. Four years ago at this time I was completing a 116 page thesis for my Masters and now I’m completing 60 piece puzzles. Yet another reminder of how quickly life can change. While the puzzle was somewhat difficult and doing it illicit a few curse words, I felt like I could use more of a challenge and my OT agreed.

This weekend I started working on a 500 piece puzzle. Yes, it’s a big jump to go from 60 pieces to 500 pieces, but that’s all I had in the house and I live by the motto “Go Big or Go Home.” My OT had “talked” to me about only doing 10-15 minutes of the puzzle and then taking frequent breaks to avoid headaches, brain fatigue, nausea, dizziness, etc. I started the puzzle and took breaks whenever I felt like I had spent what felt like hours searching for pieces I needed and couldn’t find them. Each time I returned to the puzzle, I was able to see it with a fresh set of eyes and find pieces that had previously eluded me.

I started thinking about how sometimes in life we need a perspective shift. Sometimes we are so focused on a job, relationship, friendship, something that didn’t go right, the past, etc that we fail to see the bigger picture. We focus only on those pieces we think we need to complete our puzzle and be happy. We focus on waiting for people and things outside ourselves to give us the pieces to complete our puzzle. Or we take pieces we wish desperately fit in our puzzle and do whatever we can to make them fit ,refusing to see that they don’t. It’s important to every once in a while take a step back and look at the whole puzzle. Not just the pieces you like, the pieces that fit, the pieces that are easy, but really look at all the pieces of your puzzle and whether they fit together to build the life you want to build. Maybe there are pieces you need to get rid of completely. Maybe there are pieces that just need to be turned around or looked at in a different way, so that they fit better. Maybe there are pieces you are waiting to receive from others, that you can give yourself.

I can tell you when it comes to completing puzzles and building the life you want, forcing things to fit and/or cursing when they don’t never leads to a complete and whole picture. It does lead to an increased vocabulary of curse words though.. or at least in my experience it has.