The World is a Giant Jigsaw Puzzle

The world has been seen as a metaphorical pie: each person, country, state, etc, depending on whether we look at it from a micro or macro level, has tried to maximize their slice of the pie. It is no stretch to understand then how so many people live with so little. A pie is finite: If I take more then someone else naturally gets less. This is a classic example of the butterfly effect. For anyone who may not quite understand what this is, it is simply a theory that when a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, a hurricane can occur halfway around the world. As science puts it: every action has a reaction.

Now what if we looked at the world like a giant jigsaw puzzle. A 6.6 billion piece puzzle to be exact. Each piece would represent a person. Each piece adds to the grand scheme of the puzzle that makes up the world. Now to put the puzzle together each piece must be put in its correct place according to the large picture. If one piece doesn't fit, then the whole puzzle cannot be finished. For this reason each puzzle piece has a purpose. Without that piece - no matter which one - the puzzle is incomplete without it.

Now when most people tackle solving a puzzle (although I may be speaking from my own experience) they start with a section - maybe even just a single piece - and they work from that. They may start by putting together the border and then working away, they may pick a distinct part of the puzzle and work from that, but they don't start without a plan in mind. They also have a picture of what the final, completed puzzle, should look like.

What if pieces of the puzzle refused to start fitting together? Wouldn't there be a chain reaction making it nearly impossible for other pieces to fit in their places? What if there was no picture for the finished puzzle? Would you have any clue as to where to start? Remember this isn't just a simple 1000 piece puzzle - we are talking about a 6.6 billion piece puzzle. All the confusion, anger, frustration exists because the pieces just wont work together. They are fighting to make sense of it all.

The picture on the puzzle box has always been my guide when solving the jigsaw puzzle. I need to see where each piece goes relative to the others. Unfortunately, we are trying to solve the puzzle without a picture. Without that picture each piece has trouble understanding what it's purpose is in the grand scheme of the whole thing. This is the way we live. We live without understanding of why or where we fit.

There are some people that exist and know who they are and know what they should do with their lives. These are the people that we look up to, that we choose to follow because when we are with them we have a sense of direction. We feel like we fit, like we are in the right place. When you have a 6.6 billion piece puzzle you need more than a few of these people to start making sense of things.

So the world is like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Without a picture. Without the pieces understanding their purpose. We need the picture on the box. With any luck, one day we can come together to decide what the puzzle will look like. Until that time it is on each of us, each piece, to start making some sense of ourselves. If we can do that then others will naturally start to fit in around us. When we each take it upon ourselves to find our purpose then we allow others to do the same. That is what making the world a better place is all about.

So we can look at the world like a pie, and keep eating as much as we want without any compassion for others who also have to eat the pie. Or, we can look at the world like a puzzle and know that we have a place in a bigger picture, no one piece more important than the other, with no right to more space than another. Both philosophies work, but when you see the world as a puzzle you might just start to think about putting it together instead of tearing it apart. We all exist together and we need to try to recognize that we need each other to finish. We each have a right to exist, and we need to stop acting like we are the only ones invited to desert.