The Last Piece Of The Puzzle

A journey from solving problems to witnessing wholeness

I love a good jigsaw puzzle, and in my opinion, there’s a right way to put one together.

Step 1. Start by separating the outside edge pieces from all the others.

Step 2. Using the edge pieces, build the frame of the puzzle.

Step 3. Separate all the remaining pieces into piles based on similar colors or shapes.

Step 4. Using the image of the completed puzzle, start one section at a time and build to the finish.

If you do it differently, I’d love to hear about it, but this is the way my mother taught me, which does, in my opinion, make it the right way.

When the kids were younger, a puzzle would often be on the dining room table, and we would work on it collaboratively with a caveat: everyone wanted to put the last piece in place and be responsible for its completion. This would result in pieces being hidden in bedrooms, pant pockets, and other random places so that when there was only a single space left, the holder of the final piece would claim responsibility for finishing the puzzle.

There is something special about the final piece of the puzzle.

There have been countless moments that have felt like completion was one piece away. Those sentences that begin with “If I only had” or “All we need” pave the way to discovery sessions, strategic plans, goal setting, new year resolutions, and a variety of other activities that metaphorically mirror looking in bedrooms and pant pockets for the last piece of the puzzle that is seemingly keeping completion just out of reach. Each carefully crafted and intentionally curated solution was close but not quite right, or if it did indeed fit perfectly, it exposed a space that I somehow missed, which meant there was more work to be done.

Over time, my identity, my self-worth, began to form around this ability to see what is missing and find a way to fill the gap.

Professionally, this plays well in many spaces, and it served me in entrepreneurship, organizational leadership, politics, and creative expression. When you can be the person who can not only see what is not there but help others see what could be and then co-create the perfect piece to fill the gap, you become magical, needed, and important. This is also an exhausting and extractive way to benefit from this ability, as you end up creating codependent relationships with people and organizations.

The relentless pursuit of the missing piece is a siren song, luring us with the promise of wholeness just beyond our grasp. It’s a relentless cycle of “doing,” a continuous act of searching and acquiring that mirrors a leader’s desire to find the right solutions and articulate the perfect vision. We operate from a fundamental assumption that we are broken puzzles, scattered pieces waiting to be assembled into a picture of worthiness. This belief, this deeply ingrained narrative of incompleteness, is the most profound missing piece of all. It’s the illusion we create and then spend our lives trying to solve, a habit of mind that mirrors the need to be the one to place the final piece, to claim credit for a puzzle’s completion.

My ability to thrive in the various roles I’ve held was largely contingent on how well I could craft these pieces to fit into presumed holes or in other words, problem solve. Professionally, I benefited from this way of being as it led to leadership opportunities and career growth that brought both influence and income. What it didn’t bring was stillness, what it didn’t bring was peace and what it required was to consistently see the wrong in the world so that my value could be reinforced in pointing toward the right.

It was during my time working in philanthropy that I realized that ultimately the only people who benefit from seeing things as incomplete are those who possess the resources to fill in these perceived holes and in turn can incentivize others to do that work for them.

When you no longer are working to fill the hole that someone created, you have the space to pause and witness the wholeness of creation.