Life's Puzzle Pieces

It has always somewhat bothered me to hear people say that something is God's will, especially during times of tragedy. I never really knew why it bothered me so much until I reread stories told by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen in her book, "Kitchen Table Wisdom." One story, in particular, comes to mind....

It is about a young Rachel, perhaps 3 or 4 years old at the time, observing her parents' love of puzzles. She recalls her father giving her mother a puzzle table and his gleefully pouring pieces to a puzzle on the table. To make the experience more challenging, her father hid the puzzle box top so that no one knew what the resulting picture was going to be. Rachel, deemed too young to have had the game explained to her, just stared at the puzzle pieces. This was a puzzle that had very many, small pieces. She noticed the different colors of each piece and decided that the dark ones reminded her of little black, ugly bugs. So she collected them and squirreled them away under a couch cushion. This has made putting the puzzle together a lot more challenging for the other members of her family until her mother noticed that there were indeed pieces missing. She asked Rachel if she knew the whereabouts of the missing pieces and she led her to her cache under the couch cushion, more than a hundred in all. The puzzle pieces finally out of hiding, Rachel's mother completed the puzzle revealing a beautiful picture of a serene seashore landscape. Rachel learned that the dark pieces served a collective purpose in completing something that is quite opposite of her initial, negative impression of each puzzle piece.

Life can be seen as a puzzle comprised of many, tiny, differently colored pieces - some are dark colored, some are light colored, and some aren't very colorful at all, but they all make up one big, beautiful picture. As any other person, I've been through difficult times - accruing the dark pieces that collectively make up an important part of me. I get through each dark piece of my life with the help and love of my family and friends. With each dark piece I add on to my life puzzle, I grow stronger, wiser, and more compassionate. I never want to have the dark pieces hidden from me because it's the dark times in my life where I experience growth and truly (re)discover my strengths and the strengths of the people I love. Without darkness, there is no light.

So when someone tells me that something is God's will or that some bad occurrence is just the devil trying to take over me, in a way, I am being denied of the opportunity to find deeper meaning in life's tragedies as only I know how. It's like I'm being fed some mindless, prefabricated platitude to silence my inner turmoil and to squelch the desire to reach out and connect with others. It's an attempt to hide that puzzle piece I need to complete me and make my life whole. As many tragedies there are in our lives, we need to find meaning in them. Otherwise, how else are we going to know we are alive?

It's not perfect, but then again, perfect is boring.

Came across the following while I was rummaging through some files in my old laptop:

Thoughts on Love:
Love can be anything, depending on how you use it.
It can cure, it can heal.
But at the same time, it can hurt.
On the one hand, it can be a remedy for pain.
On the other, it's poison.
Love can make you look forward to frolicking under the sun or cuddling by the fire
But it can also make you dread dreary days and cold, lonely nights
As comforting as love can be, it can also make you restless and anxious
Love is something one should be careful with
Love can be easily given as well as difficult to return
Love can be misused and mistaken for something else
You can love someone and later on doubt that you should have
One minute believe with all your being that that person deserves your love
But later on realize that that person wasn't so deserving
You risk so much when you love
Why else can it hurt so much?
Love can make you feel like you've got everything figured out
But love can also make you feel like an idiot
Love can make you proud
Love can make you ashamed
Love can be everything
Love can be nothing.

Whether you succeed or fail, if you don't learn anything from doing something, then it's all pointless.

Just a little something I realized recently. Perhaps I'll elaborate later.

Feel free to comment.

Feedom = Responsibility

To be totally free one needs to be totally aware, because our bondage is rooted in our unconsciousness; it does not come from the outside. Nobody can make you unfree. You can be destroyed but your freedom cannot be taken away unless you give it away. In the ultimate analysis it is always your desire to be unfree that makes you unfree. It is your desire to be dependent, your desire to drop the responsibility of being yourself, that makes you unfree.

The moment one takes responsibility for oneself...And remember it is not all roses, there are thorns in it; it is not all sweet, there are many bitter moments in it. The sweet is always balanced by the bitter, they always come in the same proportion. The roses are balanced by the thorns, the days by the nights, the summers by the winters. Life keeps a balance between the polar opposites. So one who is ready to accept the responsibility of being oneself with all its beauties, bitternesses, its joys and agonies, can be free. Only such a person can be free...

Live it in all its agony and all its ecstasy -- both are yours. And always remember: ecstasy cannot live without agony, life cannot exist without death, and joy cannot exist without sadness. That's how things are -- nothing can be done about it. That's the very nature, the very Tao of things.

Accept the responsibility of being yourself as you are, with all that is good and with all that is bad, with all that is beautiful and that which is not beautiful. In that acceptance a transcendence happens and one becomes free.
(pp. 1-2)

When I think about what it means to be human, I begin to think about the attributes which we, as human beings, do not possess: precision, consistency, accuracy, logic. I am reminded of one of the quotes I mentioned in an earlier post, "Humans aren't rational -- they rationalize." I've come to realize how very true that statement is. It's interesting to consider that quite possibly a lot of our behavior is not the result of our being strategic and methodical, but really how we feel. Our emotions have such a strong influence in our actions and thoughts. Most of the time we don't even realize it. I know I find myself trying to come up with different explanations for my actions without at all giving credit to which emotion I was feeling at the time or right before the time I did what I did.

"I guess the reason why I snapped at my husband was because I've just been so stressed out lately about blah...blah..blah..." (for example)

Never mind the fact that I am emotional by nature and that I had just grown lax in keeping myself in check. I suppose being emotional is what makes me human. I shouldn't deny myself my emotions, I know. I realize it's important to allow myself to feel, just as it is important to not react too quickly to whatever feelings I may be experiencing.

My husband brought up something very interesting in that other people can greatly influence how you feel, which in turn, influences your behavior. People influencing other people is a simple enough concept, but there's something there that I thought was quite profound. If we overlook our emotions in the process of rationalizing our behavior, we may also overlook who or what exactly is influencing our actions. To be able to really see what's happening and to take a step back and gain a perspective on the bigger picture, I imagine, takes quite a bit of skill and discipline.

What got me started in this stream of thought is this TV show I started watching called, "The Pickup Artist." What I've realized from watching this show is that these pickup artists have pretty much figured out the basic patterns in human behavior to which they've created formulas, which they use to their advantage. It's funny to think that here we humans are, believing ourselves as these complicated, unique, and intelligent creatures, reduced to these emotional animals that behave pretty much similarly in any given situation. Well, it's funny to me. Other people may not receive this realization so positively for it almost seems like these guys are messing with people's heads. But they're not. They've just simply figured out how to adapt to various social situations with the help of some memorized lines and a bit of acting.

Humans are flawed. We make mistakes. Perfection isn't what defines a human being and it never should. Our shortcomings make us who we are. It is not in our nature to be precise, consistent, accurate, or logical. Why? Because we become tired, get sick, do drugs, hallucinate. We are not hardwired to be perfect. To deny the fact that we have flaws is to deny our very humanity.

I've been thinking about the subject of religion and God and spirituality for quite a long time now. Especially now that I have a daughter, I've been contemplating upon the aforementioned issues within the context of parenthood and setting a good example. You see, my husband and I are not very religious, but I would like to think of myself as spiritual. Even though I don't attend mass or service at all these days, I still do very much believe that there is a higher power that created everything and to some degree, has authority over us mortal beings. I believe that two (out of many) forms of which this authority may take are morality and conscience. That bad feeling you get after having told a lie, however small it may be, that's God. The guilt that follows after not owning up to a fault, that's God, too.

I believe that God is everywhere and is everything. But my beliefs collide with what I know. Mind you, I don't know much and I'm going to be spending all my life learning. I expect that at the end of it all, I'm still not going to know very much even after a lifetime of learning. I'm concerned that I'm not going to have the answers when my daughter decides that she wants to know what or who God is.

I'm currently reading a book where in it the author recalls a conversation she had with her daughter, who was then eight years old, about God and science. I felt that the author did a nice job in explaining the difference between the two.

What I most wanted to communicate to Emma at the moment she confronted me with the conflict between science and religion was my appreciation of her question. I told her that both ideas - the monkey idea and the Adam and Eve idea - were true, but in different ways. Her question was not an "either/or" question but an "and/also" question.

"God does exist," I told her, "but God is so different from science that we can't use the same parts of our mind to understand them. If we wanted to prove to people that there was no God we could say, 'How could Noah fit all those animals in the ark? What kept the predator animals from killing the gentle herbivore animals? How come Noah and his wife didn't jump overboard to escape the smell?' It's easy to make the story sound silly. If we think literally about the story of Noah, or Moses and the burning bush, or the parting of the Red Sea, we can use science to make fun of the idea of God.

"But God and science aren't in a competition," I continued. "To teach about science we use the laws of logic and instruments like a microscope. To teach about God we use different laws, like the Ten Commandments, and we use stories instead of instruments to show how the laws work. To test and measure God we use the part of our mind that sees beauty in nature and goodness in people.

"As far as I know, the world was created through a process that took billions of years," I said. "And yes, humans did evolve from apes. But the story of God making the world in six days isn't about using chemical tests to date the age of rocks so we can figure out how old the world is. The story of creation is there to remind us of the laws of living: that working hard is important, that resting is important too, and that we should always try to do things carefully and in the right order. The story of the parting of the Red Sea is about how hard it is to leave and go somewhere new even if the old place was terrible. The story of the burning bush is about being ready and willing to hear the voice of God at unexpected times in unexpected places. God wants us to follow the examples in these stories, and that's why they are written in the Bible.

"We can't think of the world around us as God's science laboratory," I told Emma. "Have you noticed the way that, every single time, night follows day and the seasons follow each other in perfect order, the way the ocean has waves and fish have scales and it's never, ever the other way around? Did you know that the wings of some moths have markings that look like an owl's face, so that predators will stay away from them? If you think about it, all of these things can be explained in the 'and/also' way, as parts of science and parts of God's amazingly great design. Science teaches us about the patterns and systems all around us. Science makes God's incredible world credible.

"Rabbi Rembaum at our synagogue says that science tells us how things work and Torah teaches us why it's important. Other people say that science gives us a map to the stars and religion gives us a map to heaven. Religion teaches us how to be good people and how to take care of the two big gifts God has given us: the gift of life and the gift of the great wide world." For that moment, Emma understood.
(pp. 241-243)