I have spent the past two weeks of August in a small town: Leland, Michigan. It has been my family’s vacation spot for the past 30 years. It's also my home away from home, where the cell service is spotty and the noise of cicadas becomes so familiar it's almost faint, and you can expect to have at least 20 mosquito bites by the end of the night. During our getaway in our quaint cottage where we reside for these two weeks in August, common activities include kayaking, board games, bonfires, reading numerous books, playing cards, and doing puzzles.

As we do every year, my sisters and I decided to tackle on a 550-piece puzzle, which, when completed, would form a picture of the Northern Lights. As expert puzzle-doers, we were eager to get this done in a day, maybe two. However, much to our dismay, configuring this puzzle proved to be a lot harder than us puzzle connoisseurs thought. The pieces were oddly shaped and often same color, causing frustration as we put hours after hours into the puzzle’s completion. The amount of pieces left to finish the puzzle began to wind down, which led me to say to my sisters, “I bet you a piece is going to be missing once we finish.”

When it came time to place the final piece of the puzzle in with the others, sure enough, it was missing. Now I’m no Debbie Downer or Negative Nancy, but for some odd reason, I had a feeling that a piece was going to be missing. At first, my sisters and I were so mad about this. We had spent so many hours and days on this puzzle and yet, it wasn’t 100 percent complete and never would be. How annoying.

After we all walked away from this frustrating 549-piece puzzle, I couldn’t stop thinking about it for some reason. I began to realize it was kind of ironic and symbolic that one piece was missing. The piece that made the puzzle complete. In a way, I think that can be applied to people. We are all missing something in our lives; we all have our own missing puzzle piece, if you will. As humans, we inherently seek things in life to make us feel complete. We are constantly striving towards the next thing, in order to fill the void of our missing piece(s). Some people have more missing pieces than others, which can consume them, creating a sense of profound confusion and a feeling of being lost.

Despite a few days consisting of staying up late to attain the final product, our 550-piece puzzle turned out to be incomplete. There was nothing we could do except stare at the small void in the picture of the Northern Lights that should have been filled by the last piece of the puzzle. In life, however, rather than sit back and do nothing about our missing piece(s), we have the ability to discover and fill these voids. Unlike the 550-piece puzzle of the Northern Lights, we as people can make our own life puzzles complete, even if we have a few missing pieces in ourselves.

As a new school year is just around the corner, this strikes me as a perfect time to discover your missing piece, and strive towards filling it in. It's your fresh start. As I spend these last few days in the small town of Leland, Michigan and my family’s cottage full of love and laughter, I prepare myself to say a bittersweet goodbye and an excited hello to another year at Indiana University. And as I do all of this and type away on my laptop, I think about my own missing puzzle piece, which is honestly to be determined, Hopefully I will discover it and fill it during my time abroad in Florence, Italy come February.

To some, this whole idea may seem cheesy. But whether we want to admit and accept it or not, we all have a missing puzzle piece in ourselves, our lives. We wouldn’t constantly be striving towards achieving the next best thing if we didn’t feel as if something in our lives or in ourselves was missing. Think about it.

What’s your missing puzzle piece?