The Puzzle Can Build Itself...

I do an awful job of just going with the flow. It's pretty much the reason why my aspirations to drop out of high school and be a hippie fell through. That and I like being... clean. And I'm way too introverted.

Yeah. Never a pragmatic idea in retrospect. Oh well. I digress.

I'm a man (boy... guy... dude... male) that likes to be in control of his life at all times. So I'm usually pretty disappointed because outside of my own actions I have control over diddly squat. Yes, it is very frustrating, thanks for asking.

I learn a lot in college (and the learning is very heavy on the musical side), but I pride myself in what I learn outside of lectures, rehearsals, and lessons. The things that I learn about myself as a person just by living day to day. And my latest epiphany is that sometimes you just have to let go of the reigns and let life take you where it intends to take you.

Like I said, I'm a control freak. This lesson has been hard for me to come to terms with. I don't trust easily and fate is definitely not excluded from that. I still am not 100% comfortable with the idea of just letting things go. I've used a puzzle as an analogy before on a post about how great it feels to fit in without having to force the pieces to fit together.

Now I want to use a puzzle again in a different way. If my life is a puzzle maybe sometimes it's healthy for me to not even try and put it together. The purpose of a puzzle is to put the pieces together so that they make a picture that's printed on the box the puzzle came in. What if my life doesn't have a box? What if the pieces were just dumped out in front of me? No picture conveniently printed on a box for me to look at. No corner or edge pieces to set up a framework with. Just a jumble of pieces that may or may not turn into some vivid beautiful picture.

I'm not a visual artist. I can't draw or sculpt or any of that cool stuff. Not even my handwriting is aesthetically pleasing. So what if I just don't build the puzzle? What if, instead of siting down and stressing over what piece goes where, I just let the hustle and bustle of life shift the pieces around for however long I walk the planet?

Unorthodox? Undeniably so. Impractical? Maybe. But I study music and psychology. I'm the definition of impractical.

So why sit down and worry about things that might be outside of my realm of control?

Why not let the puzzle build itself?

Maybe it's okay to not always be in control.