Blog 3715 – 01.12.2026

Trying To Find That Missing Piece

My wife’s addiction to jigsaw puzzles began as did my dear and departed mother’s when she was a young girl working jigsaw puzzles on the kitchen table. I recall that early in our relationship which is for both of us the most enduring, if we both live, this August tenth we will celebrate thirty-six years as man and wife, that we started our own family tradition of working together each Christmas a jigsaw puzzle. Our favorites were of Coca Cola themed advertisements featuring Santa Claus. The pieces that made up his red suit and white beard, hair, and trim were the most difficult pieces to work.

Jigsaw puzzling is all about finding the missing piece. And little is more frustrating in life than spending hours working a puzzle only to find one piece is missing. The honor of putting in the last piece is reserved for those we love. I don’t know how many times, thinking it was the last piece that we found it did not fit, requiring us to re-examine the whole puzzle till we found a close but not quite perfect fit that was the culprit.

I remember as a young man hearing a particular Christian slogan that stuck with me. It said that like a jigsaw puzzle each one of us has a God or Jesus shaped piece missing at the center of us without which we are incomplete. It is a romantic love theme as well, this notion that each person has a soul mate out there somewhere that will complete them.

This myth characteristically comes from an even more ancient religion than Christianity or the relatively more modern religion of Romanticism. The myth goes that we were, each of us, created as conjoined twin souls and bodies divided at birth requiring us to search the world for our counterpart, the missing piece that will complete us. Lovers often refer to the other as their better half and say things like, “It takes two halves to make a whole.” But, I think, it takes two wholes to make a friendship or a marriage.

The math just does not work. Purportedly if one person is giving less that fifty percent the other person must give more to keep the relationship at one hundred percent, yet if either or both gives more that fifty percent there is a paradox, an impossible situation – more than one hundred percent. Like our President promising to lower our health care costs by eight hundred percent which would mean the insurance companies, hospitals, doctors and pharmaceutical companies would be sending us checks in the mail instead of bills. But, don’t hold your breath till that happens or your family will be concerned more with funeral bills than medical bills.

We are not jigsaw puzzles missing a piece, but we are whole, we are complete persons and counting on someone else to complete us is a burden that will over time destroy a relationship not enhance it. Sorry, Barbra Streisand, but people who need people are not the happiest people in the world, but the saddest whose family and friends usually end up running away from their constant demands.

One of the phrases in my daily mantra says, “I am healthy, I am happy, I am whole, I am patient, I am persistent, but above all I am kind.” You may think I am being mean or unkind to say that believing you have a soul mate is like looking for the missing piece that was never missing, but it is a kindness to remind you that you are complete, you are whole, and you are meant to be happy. Your higher best self and mine is no “half-assed” creator. 

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David James White