This past Sunday I got my son a puzzle. It was a beautiful panoramic portrait of NYC at dusk from the Hudson River vantage point. My son is 5 years old but I promised to help him being that it said ages 12 and older on the box. (Puzzle making is a great family activity and it is nice to sit with your kids and work on a project together with some nice music playing in the background and some munchies on the side…)
We generally have a week to do a puzzle since we have guests every Friday night and the dining room table has to be cleared off by then. So we jumped right into it.
Of course we turned over all the pieces. Did the frame first. Broke it into different areas; the sky, the water, the buildings. And over the week we saw it all come together.
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Last night we still had 100 pieces left, so I sat together with my wife to finish. Being that it was the last pieces were sky pieces that all look exactly the same, we couldn’t do it all, so this morning the kids jumped out of bed to try and complete it.
The bus came and there was still 15 left.
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Through the process of elimination I finally got it down to the last piece when I realized…I was missing it.
Hey, after all that work it was frustrating! You can’t hang up a puzzle, no matter how pretty a picture, if it is missing a piece right in the middle!! I tried to pay attention to the skyline, to the lights reflecting on the river, to the different architecture of the buildings, the nightlife on the piers.
But I couldn’t. My eyes kept going back towards the missing piece. It was like a gaping hole in the heaven that was about to swallow up the entire New York City.
Hours spent doing a project, all for naught. The beauty of Earth lost because of a half inch piece of cardboard.
But then I took a deep breathe (and a shower) and a I realized; Why focus on the small negative? There are 749 beautiful pieces. The rest of the skyline is perfect. The colors are vibrant and the sun is setting on a bustling city.
Why keep looking at the one piece that is missing?!
With our children, spouses, co-workers, friends and everyone else on Earth, there is so much good out there. There is so much going for us. So many beautiful things to pay attention to. Each little piece has its own purpose and adds so much to the whole picture. Every color is valuable and crucial.
So we have to focus on all those valuable things that we do have and that add so much to our lives.
And the piece that is missing, look away. Don’t focus on it. The whole city isn’t disappearing through that one half inch piece of cardboard.
And by the way…I found the piece under the table.
