I've always found the very nature of life to be fascinating, beautiful without end to the amazing intricacies of each person's experience and how that can arrive together to create the individual and the social group.
Imagine if you will, a grand cathedral window, a masterpiece of stained glass. Each piece of colored glass, meticulously crafted and unique, contributes to the overall image. We can think of ourselves in a similar way. Our lives are grand mosaics, and the experiences we have are like the individual fragments of glass. Some come from our parents, shaping the foundation of our personalities. Others are gleaned from our friends, teachers, mentors, and even strangers we meet along the way. As we encounter new people and navigate new situations, we gather more and more fragments, adding depth and complexity to our own unique mosaic.
Life's beauty lies in the tapestry woven from each person's experience. We begin as simple mosaics, the base colors gifted by our parents. These pieces represent the foundation of our childhoods, shaping our initial understanding of the world. But not all their experiences fit the picture we envision for ourselves.
Piecing together parts of our friends that we like that are different from our parents, is the next step. Perhaps a blue of the ability for your friend to express their sadness with such sincerity...a green from the passion you saw in another friend when they felt jealousy, even though you didn't like the jealousy itself. In this way every person has something potentially to offer to our image and at this time in our life, while we aren't acutely aware of this, we seem plenty capable of taking advantage of it and incorporating new aspects into our personality as we meet more and more people and experience more and more things in this life. In our early adulthood, the picture of our future is blurry. We're just starting to grasp the vastness of possibilities and the need to prepare. This blurry mosaic represents the potential we see ahead.
Then, life takes an unexpected turn. Just as a rose blooms slowly, we might suddenly experience a rapid growth spurt – like bamboo shooting up. During this time, we not only take pieces from others, but also offer fragments of ourselves. This exchange hones our mosaic, making it more intricate and nuanced with every interaction, every lesson learned. This constant exchange of fragments, taking and offering, is what makes life's journey so fascinating. Our mosaic is never truly complete, forever evolving as we encounter new people and experiences.
I see a picture much more clearly of my future. I aspire to be a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner... imagine a man sitting at a desk working with other people to piece together their own picture a little more to their liking and how to remove pieces that do not serve the picture they want to create. I get to be a teacher, to self artists of this world, not making their picture for them... but talking them through their own process of making their picture more like they desire.
Mental health isn't just a passion for me to help others, its a direct manifestation of my working on myself so very intentionally. I am proud of how far I have come in my journey and how very aware that I am going to be continuing to refine my own mosaic through all of my days I have remaining. Just like a jigsaw addict, I hope to work on it daily.
Thank you for listening =)
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