To start, that box of chocolates is hazardous to your healthspan. But, seriously. I think life is more like a jigsaw puzzle. Think about it. What’s the first thing you always do when you start a new jigsaw puzzle? Well, if you’re like me and my family, we always dig around and find those straight-edges to make the frame of the puzzle. It’s like childhood is the framework for our lives just like the frame is the beginning of putting together a puzzle. In childhood, we are sponges absorbing new information, learning things — putting down our framework to grow from and keep adding to so that we continue to grow and improve. That framework includes diet, exercise, and lifestyle. It’s really where and when we learn all kinds of things (like eating sugary cereals is called “breakfast” and that sitting in front of the television snacking on chips is what everyone does). The thing is, people always say “Oh, they’re kids, let them enjoy eating whatever they want because it won’t always be like that”. Right. Let’s give them a framework full of nutrient holes. Okay, okay… that’s not the whole thing I’m getting at with this post (just something to think about because there’s a post that will be about this down the road).
Back to the puzzle analogy. What’s the next thing you do with a puzzle? You put together things in chunks, right? Find pieces with colors or designs that may look similar and put them in piles. Have enough pieces in a pile, start trying to put some together. You try one piece, then another and before you know it, you have a chunk. Maybe it can attach somewhere, maybe it’s not ready yet. Perhaps the person across from you was working on something similar and has that one piece that you need to attach it to the frame. Do you see where I’m going with this? No? We build ourselves and our lives in chunks — infancy (learning about our immediate environment), childhood (basic learning of all things), puberty (learning to adapt to our bodily changes), adulthood (learning to stand on our own and being responsible for others), etc.. So, in this sense, our lives are way more like a jigsaw puzzle that we put together a bit at a time.
Sometimes, we reach for a different pile of puzzle pieces because the one in front of us has us stumped or seems too difficult, just like how we reminesce of better times or look to the future with hope that tomorrow will be better. Other times, we succomb to “forcing” a piece to fit because, “dammit, just fit”! Then, there are those moments where everything just seems to come together perfectly. Yeah, life isn’t like a box of chocolates, it’s a jigsaw puzzle and you can either have fun with it or you can get frustrated by it. Either way, that puzzle isn’t going to put itself together.
After Thought: Also, working on puzzles for real is a great way to exercise certain parts of your brain, just sayin’.
Hart Health 