Jigsaw of life - Learnings from a stand-up comedy special

Disclaimer : The next entire piece is the brainchild of Daniel Sloss( Check out his netflix special( I’ve been getting abnormally enormous life lessons from stand up specials)),and I’m just sharing it, because I want to document it.

So, in his stand up special “Jigsaw”, Sloss talks about the analogy his father shared with him when he was a kid. He compared the life as a jigsaw puzzle. As you would go with a regular jigsaw, you will start putting pieces together from all the corners. Now imagine these corners to each be, friends, family, job & hobbies/interests. As you go along with life, you start putting these corner pieces together and that’s unique for your own jigsaw called life. Now, The center piece. His father told him that center piece is your life partner. And the tricky thing about center piece is it has to be exact fit, else it will screw up the entire puzzle. If we go by this analogy, we are made to believe the same throughout our lives. It’s definitely romantic, fairy tale stuff, but what it does to our child/teenage mind is give us the feeling, that if we don’t have that center piece filled, we are not whole, we are not complete.

And due to all sorts of pressure, we start to always look for, trying to fit this missing jigsaw piece for us. And whenever we feel there is someone remotely fitting to this, we give our everything to make them fit. If we need to, we adjust all 4 corners, we keep on doing this, until our entire jigsaw looks different. Now,why this happens.

The person whom you are trying to fit into your jigsaw, comes with their own jigsaw, in which they are trying to fit you; and hence, most of the times, you both end up screwing each others’ jigsaws.

But what if, we worked on creating that center piece by ourselves, with our passion,our soul, and this way, our jigsaw will be 100% ours. We would be complete. And then when we meet someone who is also content with their own jigsaw, and not just forcefully trying to fit someone in the center, they can love you the complete you.

One of the tricky part, sometimes people realise that the other person doesn’t quite fit into their jigsaw after some time, and then they don’t have courage to change it. A question for them : Would you let it be rest of your life?

Fun fact : This piece of advice has caused thousands/lacs breakups & divorces world wide, not kidding at all.