Piece of the Puzzle December 10, 2008

There’s something really soothing about jigsaw puzzles.

When I was little, I had this puzzle of two puppies sitting in a mailbox that I would put together over and over again. I found it a couple of days ago when my family and I were digging through boxes and putting up our Christmas decorations. I’ve always tended to be the slow-mover in my family, I often take a lot of pitstops along the way (for things I deem more important). I can’t help it that those times happen to be when heavy lifting of a Christmas tree from the attic is the course I veer from.

Anyway, I decided to take a break and put together that puzzle. I started thinking about why anyone does this. It’s really simple, but fantastic.

I like to think about life as if it were a great puzzle. I am a puzzle, the world is a puzzle, the universe is a puzzle. The whole point of this journey is to keep finding the pieces and putting them in their place. Believe me, all pieces have their place. Especially those total pain, jig-jagged edged, one color pieces that go somewhere in the endless middle. What is interesting is the different ways we approach solving puzzles. When I was little, I took to that puppy dog puzzle as if it were something I had to put together. The pieces would make it whole, and I was in charge of bringing them together. I notice in my own thoughts, as I start to grow older, that I see many challenging situations as something massive that I have to take apart.

I think that is what a lot of us do when we grow older. No longer are we at ease with incompleteness. We see it as a negative and something we must break down even further to try to understand so that we can build it up again. I guess to put it simply, as children we spend our times building the puzzles and as we grow older we change direction and spend time breaking them down.

It’s not always true, but I do think it tends to happen (and in a lot of important situations – love, career, planning for the future). We make things more complicated than they are.

I will mention that age takes an obvious affect on some people. My older sister completely destroyed my puzzle once I had finished. Maybe we haven’t grown up at all.

I will, but I can’t December 8, 2008

Much like the Superbowl, I watch the Hallmark movies on CBS entirely for the commercials. I am genuinely disappointed by fleeting commercial breaks that are few and far between. But when they do come around, they are the most gut-wrenching, beautifully sentimental, tear-invoking moments that only the perfect greeting card can redeem.

Last night was different because the movie itself was just as good as the commercials. It followed a teacher, Brad Cohen, who has Tourette’s syndrome but once finally accepted to teach at a school, made an incredible impact on his students. It was particularly inspiring  to me because my sister is a teacher and I see the incredible effect she has on students and it really is a job with a lot of power to change the world.

The reason that Cohen became a teacher was because when he was a young boy in school, the principal taught him to embrace his disease. This principal explained that the other kids in school thought he was weird only because they were ignorant. So he educated the children, and they accepted him. Cohen took that same approach and applied it to his teaching philosophy. He educated his students about everything, encouraged them to ask questions,and would not allow them to be ignorant.

One line from the movie struck me in particular. It was something to the effect that the difference between children and adults is that children say “I will” when adults say “I can’t”. I thought that was so interesting and true, unfortunately. When we are children, we think we can take on the world. If someone challenges our ability to do something, we respond with a “Why not?”. We feel like we have all the time in the world to accomplish whatever we want. When we grow up, though, reality sets in and we realize how short life is and how limited we are. But what if we didn’t think that way? What if we proceeded as if we could achieve anything? Just proceeding in that way, it would not matter a whole heck of a lot if we actually did achieve everything. The fact that we believe we could some time in the future gives us hope, and that hope can carry us to do even better (though different) things.

Grocery shopping with Grandma November 16, 2008

A couple of days ago I took my grandmother to the grocery store. I learn something new every time I spend time with this woman and I doubt she has any idea that she is teaching me.

She has the heart and soul of a true child. Hers is the kind of soul tarnished only by the wisdom of her 83 years. Otherwise, it is completely new and full of life. The night before, she had just been released from the hospital after about a week of tests and she could not have been more thrilled to get out. She has been admitted several times in the past few years due to her heart, but I swear it beats stronger and lighter each time she comes home. Each time she threatens to escape her eighth floor hospital room and start walking home, and that is funny because she is actually serious.

Everytime I visit her or speak to her I watch her in amazement and hope that I can grow up to have half the wisdom she has. Her past is interesting, because she grew up on a farm in rural Nebraska where she had little time to be a child because she was too busy working and taking care of all her siblings. She did not get the chance to go to high school because of the work she had to do. The woman I see now is one who has not allowed herself to be hardened by this loss of a childhood. Instead, she has embraced the opportunity to regain it now in her later years.

And maybe that’s better. She has done a lot of living and seen a lot of things, and now she is more ready than ever to embrace the little things in this life. What strikes me most is her faith. She is a strong Catholic and always has been, and her almost blind, unceasing faith in the Lord is like that of a child. It is innocent and completely without obstacle, and it is not that she is gullible. She has faced many trials in this life and had many more chances than any of us to give up on the Lord.

I am definitely not one to encourage blind acceptance of beliefs, I absolutely advocate questioning everything so that you know what you really think and make your beliefs your own. That being said, once we get over the questioning, we have to adopt something. We have to stand for something. And that cannot be done by just proclaiming your identity as a believer, it has to be pursued and backed by the enthusiasm and fervor that we all showed as children towards something. Likely, much of the enthusiasm of our pasts was directed towards our future. Our project now must be to direct it toward our present.