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.

Playground Romance December 4, 2008

I can think of three specific romances that blossomed on the playground. The second and third grades were my luckiest years for love, and I managed to squeeze it all into the 20 minutes allotted for recess. How magical.

It is interesting to think about, how we were so young and trying to be so grownup by falling in love. What is this inherent need that we have? We could enter a huge discussion about the nature of love and all its intricacies, but then again, maybe it is as simple as a recess. It is something that takes us from the ordinary, a recess from other comparatively ho-hum moments.

As a girl of 21, I am keenly aware of the searching and hoping for love that people my age (and all ages, really) engage in. It is interesting because at my time, love seems so complicated to me and to my friends. Romances have come and gone, been good and flubbed, and then just plainly disappeared. It becomes this thing we have to analyze because we just cannot understand. But maybe if we remember how simple it is, think back to how easily our playground romances flowed, we could be better equipped to see love as it hits us square between the eyes (whenever that may be) and to wait patiently until then.

I stumbled upon this feature from NBC’s Today Show where a young boy publicize’s the book he wrote to help boys of all ages to do the right things in order to get the right girls. Besides being exceptionally well-spoken for a boy of 9, his advice is exceptionally insightful yet simple.

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26184891/vp/28050331#28050331

Identity and Language December 3, 2008

Two Sundays ago at mass the homily was particularly inspiring and insightful (something that happens probably a lot more often than I recognize). But it really hit me well because it appealed to a lot of the things I think about life and also in something I had thought about for this blog.

The readings for the day spoke of who would and who would not be welcomed into the kingdom of heaven, depending on how each lives his or her life. For purposes of the manner in which it is best to live your life, this can be applied to any faith, I think. The priest took this theme and applied it to the idea of identity. The discussion was very fruitful for me.

He remarked how important it is to understand identity. Most often and most evident are cultural identities, those which set apart and also bring together different people from different parts of the world. The most obvious differnce between people from different cultures is language. Language has always fascinated me, I wonder what it really is saying. To some degree it is very complicated, but at its foundations it is so natural that it cannot be that complicated. We learn language as children just from being around people employing it. There isn’t a real study involved (besides further grammatical clarifications in grade school). But essentially, language is something we all come to know intimately just by participating. 

What I got from the homily was that the best way to live on this earth is to learn the language of love. And not just learn its grammatical intricacies, but instead to completely inhabit the words. As children we usually just say what we think, and it is without any walls. We are not worried about saying the wrong thing, because we really only see one way to say things best. I imagine what it’s like when you truly fall in love. When you love someone, the best way to tell them is just to say “I love you.” People often remark about the power of three little words, and it is so true.

Sometimes as we grow older, however, I think we start to believe we need more words. We have this desire to be heard and to explain ourselves. But if we are able to completely inhabit a few words that mean a lot, then there will be no need to hide behind all the others. By engaging in this language of love, then we can all create an identity that can place us amongst everyone. It breaks down the barriers between people that speak English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, or what have you.