Puzzles

I've always enjoyed doing puzzles.  Some of my earliest memories involve doing puzzles at the age of 3-4.  I would do 50-100 piece jigsaw puzzles.  My mom would help me pick out a puzzle and dump out the pieces on the dining room table.  She would tell me to start by flipping over all of the pieces and then begin with the outside pieces.  I would toil away and eventually complete the whole puzzle.  I don't know if I enjoyed puzzles so much because I was good at them or if I was good at them because I enjoyed them and spent a lot of time doing them.

Fast forward 30 years or so and as an adult I find myself approaching problems in life as a series of puzzles.  Each potential solution is like a puzzle piece that I'm trying to match to the problem puzzle piece.  Some pieces are obviously wrong.  Some look like they are a good fit, but upon further inspection, they aren't quite the right size or shape.  Some appear to have to solution at all so I just work on some other part of the puzzle and hope I'll find the right solution later.

First Post

I've been toying with the idea of writing a blog for a few years.  It started thinking about writing when I began to follow the blog of one of my elementary/high school friends: Whatever.  Actually it may have started before that, but looking back that seems to be an important milestone at which point I began thinking about it more often.  "If she can do it, why can't I?"  Actually she's written a book and her blog posts are written very nicely, but in any case that's when I started to think about writing a blog.  Part of my resistance was due to the fact that she is a good writer and I am more of a rambler.  Another part was the part of self doubt that a lot of people have about a lot of things they don't do in life.  I finally came around after reading a book called "Start." by Jon Acuff.  It's a pretty funny book, but in it he mentions

1. If I died today, what would I regret not being able to do? 2. Are those the things I'm spending time doing right now?

I decided that one of those things was never writing a blog.  I enjoy writing, even though I'm not that great at it.  I feel it would be beneficial to my thinking if I were able to record some of my thoughts about life, work and relationships.  So I decided to get up and start writing.  That's what I just did.

p.s. - Thanks to Terri for writing an awesome blog.  It's always made me wonder what I would put in my blog.