What Was Once A Puzzle Is Now Just Pieces

It all seemed so simple in the brochure. Eat your vegetables, do what you're told, go to school, get a job, and life would be smooth. Basically, they told us to embrace our inner cow and the World would curl up in our laps. Not so much.

Seems like they issued the puzzle with a couple pieces missing. Happiness comes to mind and so does freedom of choice. What if I didn't want to wear a suit to support the three kids I didn't want either? I struggled with “supposed to” and “want to” for years. Just ask my ulcers, they'll tell you. But the reality is no law- physical or biblical-says you can't be a responsible, productive person doing what makes you happy. Do you know what that means for us? We can choose to do what makes us happy and still be responsible adults.

Wow!

The Sandbox

When I was young, the neighbor would come home from his quarry job and empty his boots into his kids' sandbox. It wasn't peculiar to my six year old self, it was simply a thing that happened every afternoon like watching “The Munsters”. It isn't even anything to think about now, except I'm on this kick where every thing has deep meaning and purpose.

I pick up change in parking lots. Enough change to fill up my car and take a day trip every year so it makes me wonder why the people who dropped it didn't bother to pick it up. Maybe they didn't think it worth their while, but pennies make dollars and so on. It's little things that make up big things.

A little at a time is how we build things and how we lose things. And a little time sneaks away faster than anything. Here's an example: I had a coworker who came back exactly five minutes late from lunch every day. Not a big deal, until you do the math 25 minutes per week x 50 weeks=1,250 minutes or 20.8 hours a year. She skipped two and a half days of work five minutes at a time. Just for fun, pick any day and add up how much time you waste on your phone or surfing meaningless stuff on the internet. I'm afraid of the actual number but I suspect I waste at minimum two hours a day on YouTube. That works out to be 30.4 twenty-four hour days days a year. An entire month I'm not doing anything useful

Now for the neighbor, maybe his kids' sandbox was an hourglass measuring his life or just a practical place to empty his shoes. Anyway, the point is the little you things you do every day are what make up your life in the end.