Sometimes you look at your life and all you see is a big jumble of pieces. Looking at all the pieces, you’re wondering how you’re going to put them all together.
Then someone comes along and hands you the box top to their puzzle pieces. It’s a puzzle box with a thousand pieces. Seems like the right amount. The picture even looks similar to the pieces you have lying on the table in front of you.
In the memoir I’m writing, Arrived: How Facing the Darkness Inspired Me to Shine, I tell about my experience growing up with stories of my great-grandfather, Joshua Fearnley. Unlike my immediate family, Joshua had built a fortune in real estate. From the stories, it seemed he had what I felt lacking in my life.
I set out to pattern my life after his. I used his box top to begin putting the pieces of my own puzzle together.
What I didn’t realize was the box top Joshua had created for his life looked very different from the puzzle pieces I had lying on my table. To begin with, we were born in different centuries. A hundred twenty-four years separate his birth in Yorkshire, England and my birth in Salem, Oregon, USA.
There’s enough of a gap, I never met him. Neither did my mother, his granddaughter. All we had were stories to pattern our lives after.
That just shows how powerful stories are!
After spending decades of my life trying to match my pieces with the box top to the puzzle he created, I was left feeling frustrated, disappointed, and like an utter failure.
I was ready to throw it all away, when I had the impression I needed to start again. Find my own pattern for the story of my life.
It’s only now eight years later after I began putting the pieces of my puzzle back together that I realize that the box tops for puzzles are created after the puzzle is complete. Not before.
We’re not meant to use somebody else’s box top. No matter how wonderful my great-grandfather’s story is, it’s not my story. I wasn’t meant to recreate his story. I am meant to create my own.
As Joseph Campbell said, “If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.”
I need to work with pieces on the table in front of me. Not the pieces on somebody else’s table.
As I reflect on this, I believe the pieces on the table belong to a mosaic I am creating. Not to a puzzle that someone else created. I have to, get to, find my own path, design my own pattern.
A number of years ago, I took a stained glass class where I designed and crafted a mosaic. In making that mosaic, I took pieces of glass and placed them together. I added some pieces from a collection already available. Other pieces I had to cut down from larger pieces of glass. While I was a neophyte to working with glass, it was thrilling to see how the pieces came together.
I could see that by improving the craft, learning more about the processes, and the materials, and the tools I could create something beautiful. While I was frustrated with my lack of skill and knowledge, I know from hindsight and developing my talents in other areas of life, it could have been even more satisfying.
When you design your own story as a story mosaic, the end result is much more satisfying than following someone else’s pattern.
As Judy Garland said, “Always be a first rate version of yourself and not a second rate version of someone else.”
Yes, there are frustrating moments when the glass doesn’t break quite the way you like. Or when your skills are just developing and you have the vision for a much richer image.
But the thing is, the more that you practice your skills, the more you practice your crafts, the more you work on improving the design of what you’re creating, the better the mosaic gets.
My invitation is to look at your story as a mosaic, something that you’re designing and putting together, rather than as a box of puzzle pieces where someone hands you the box top and your job is just to put them together according to their design. Enjoy the journey! Enjoy putting the pieces together. Find the path that works for you and the people whose lives you’re touching.