Yesterday I found a piece of the puzzle. It was lying on the side of the road where I take my walks.
It doesn’t have any color or a design on it, and there’s no box with a picture on it to show me what the completed puzzle looks like.
If this isn’t a metaphor for being in this Pandemic, I don’t know what is.
I started thinking about how I want to see the whole picture of what lies ahead, for me and for us, as a society and culture.
How long will we be in Stay at Home, Lockdown?
What will it look like when we are released?
How will my day-to-day life change?
What will have changed, forever?
What is possible now?
So many questions, and these are just a few.
But, of course we can’t have, or know, the whole picture.
We never could, but this journey feels like a more exaggerated or acute version of the Not Knowing that we usually live.
Here’s the thing: we will be given each piece, as we go along.
We won’t necessarily know what all the pieces are, or how any particular piece fits with all the others, or what the picture is that it will eventually make.
But we will know the one piece for now.
The art form for our times, then, it seems, would be to develop the awareness, skills, consciousness, whatever it takes, to be in peace with just the next piece of the puzzle.
How do we do that?
What does it require, to move with just the next piece?
Lots of things come to mind as I ask that question:
- Respect for the process of the unfolding
- Patience with the process
- Commitment (to what?)
- Confidence (in what?)
- Curiosity, instead of frustration
- To honor and trust the timing, and that it takes the time that it takes.
When I looked at that list, I thought that they all feel like they are coming from the place in my head where the Shoulds live.
They all sound important, but it feels like something else is even more important.
What really matters is that I receive each puzzle piece and move forward from an inner place of clarity and stability.
For me, this means that my morning practices of grounding and centering and journaling are even more important than they ever have been.
That especially during the uncertainty of the Pandemic, I commit to a consistency of focus on my inner life, like never before.
That is the only way I know to be ready to pick up each puzzle piece as it comes to me and to be able to move forward with it in inner clarity and stability.
What is it important for you to attend to, as you put your new puzzle pieces into place?
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