Ever since I've had children and my life has become my own to control, I have found that things often resemble one of those sliding tesselation puzzles. You know the ones, that have a grid of squares and you must move the pieces around until they at last make a picture.
Its a bit like that, organising different parts of everyday life, moving the pieces around and around until suddenly - it fits! The bigger picture can be seen.
Todays example involved cooking sunday lunch: I'm peeling turnips and wondering how I am going to manage to store all the turnips we've grown so that they don't go off, because in time we want to keep pigs again and turnips are a great feed for them. The only practical way I have found to store them so far is in soups - not so good for pigs, but fine for humans.
This year, because of the current lack of feed for pigs, we have taken on 4 orphan lambs instead. We have bottle fed them since they arrived, with cows milk and they have done very well. We asked the shop accross the road whether, rather than throw away the bottles of milk that had got to the day of expiry, we could take them off their hands. Fantastically this meant we gradually built up a chest freezer full of milk to then feed the lambs with once they arrived in the springtime.
The shop has stopped wasting its unsold milk - piece 1 slides...
The milk has been drunk by the lambs and saved us from buying in formula - another piece slides..
I'm left with a mountain of plastic bottles....no picture apparent yet ..
We start harvesting vegetables and soup-ing what we cant eat fresh...another piece of the picture slides...
I use the plastic bottles to store the soup and the final piece in the grid slides into place.
The tesselation happens by moving the given pieces around and around until they all fit to form an organised picture, with no gaps and no overlaps.
Ok, so its a pretty obscure example - what do you expect, peeling turnips is not the most inspiring time you can have. But it did remind me of other times, of juggling children, people, events, money - when suddenly the disparate pieces have slid into place and a glimpse of an ordered, cohesive bigger picture has been acheieved.
I'm sure a mathematician could explain this all much better - there is probably a nifty algorhithm or formula that saves all the waffle about turnips.
But in my head I can see some order from seemingly separate events.... so thats reassuring...
