When I was 12 years old, I was assigned to recite a poem about life. It was my first such recitation. And while I don’t know who wrote it, and after 33 years can’t remember all of it, I remember part of it went something like this:

“Life isn’t given us all of one piece, it’s more like a patchwork quilt,
Each hour and minute a patch to fit in, to the pattern that’s being built.

With some patches bright and some patches dark and some that seem ever so dull,
But if we were given to set some apart, we’d hardly know which to cull.”

The life concepts I gleaned from that poem were great for me to learn as a 12-year-old, and the older I’ve gotten and the longer I’ve lived (and the more challenges that have come to me) the more I’ve decided that if we’re wise, we’ll never abandon or give up on the quilting project of our life, but choose, instead, to keep quilting through all the patches. And we’ll be wiser yet, and a lot happier, if we choose to be grateful for all the pieces and patches of life: the bright, the dark, the good, the bad.

“It’s like this old patchwork quilt my momma used to have…Each piece on that quilt meant something. And some of those pieces were the [darn] ugliest things you’ve ever seen…But some of the pieces were so beautiful they almost hurt my eyes to look at when I was a kids…That’s the best you can hope for…That your life turns out like that patchwork quilt. That you can add some bright, sparkling pieces to the dirty, stained ones you have so far. That in the end, the bright patches might take up more space on your quilt than the dark ones.” (Brook McKinley, Shades of Gray)