A Puzzling Addiction

The alert reader may have noticed I’ve missed a few days of posting here. And yet the world went out without my comments, wholly unaffected. But who knows? Maybe a sentence someday will—or has—sparked something in someone that led them to a particular consequence that had either personal or collective notable effects. For example, at a school I guest-taught at today (my next post), a woman from Guadalajara, Mexico who teaches Spanish said that somehow listening to my Boom Chick a Boom CD, a recording that seemed like it made barely the tiniest ripple in the world, convinced her to become a teacher. In a way that made her thankful and she thanked (rather than cursed) me. Who woulda thunk?

 

So the dazzling explanation for my absence. On Monday, the weather prediction was for  a big storm in the Bay Area which would have put a damper (so to speak) on my daily walk or bike ride. So I dug out a jigsaw puzzle as the perfect rainy day activity. And it was! This one especially engaging as it was movie posters for old-time classic films, most of which I had watched and loved. I hate puzzles with long stretches of blue sea or sky and no clue other than shape and sometimes subtle shifts in color to figure out how to join pieces together. But this one, with its combination of words and faces and contrasting colors, was just the ticket.

 

Probably thanks to my parents, who didn’t habitually drink coffee or alcohol and were too old to experiment with the drug culture. I have been spared addiction to all those vices, be they mild or severe. I’m big on routine and discipline, but that’s different from addiction, the kind where you are driven and simply must do something or you feel off-center. I did have a taste of it in 8^th grade when I developed a passion for it and just couldn’t wait to feel the ball in my hand and get the satisfaction of the first dribble. In fact, so much so, that in the winter, I actually shoveled off the basketball court in the nearby playground!

 

Once I get going on a puzzle, it’s a bit like that. I’m magnetically drawn back to it no matter what else is going on. I promise myself, “Just 10 more pieces,” and then find myself at 20 and then 30. It’s a puzzling addiction to have a puzzle addiction, but so it is. However, it is far from toxic and the pleasure of your fingers reaching for a random piece and feeling guiding from some other world like a living Ouija board to just the right place is a great thrill and pleasure. The multiple neuro-transmitters firing at full throttle to recognize and sort by shape, color, image is a healthy practice, a guard at the gate turning away dementia. Why fight it?

 

But now that I’m almost done (see photo below), it’s back to sorting a different kind of puzzle. The kind that wholly accepts the Greek-Roman idea of being born into this world with a whole guiding image (your genius/ your daimon) that breaks into pieces at birth and if you’re fortunate and aware and determined to discover who you’re meant to be and what you’re meant to do, you spend the rest of your life trying to fit the pieces of your life together. One tiny jigged saw at a time until the image begins to appear. With the help of meditation, art, writing, time in nature, perhaps therapy, you look for the patterns, the shapes, the colors, the images that are wholly yours. Even when they seem like something you want to discard— too jagged, too drab, too ugly, too maddeningly hard to fit in anywhere— you eventually realize that they are an intricate part of the pattern that helps hold all the other pieces together. Not sure whether putting the last piece in is a dramatic death-bed moment or something that happens earlier and you live out the enjoyment of the image, dusting it off once in a while, or playfully taking it apart and then putting it together. Who knows? With a metaphor, anything can happen.

 

Now on to the last 100 pieces of the 1,000 piece puzzle. Then I’ll watch all the movies! 

PS: I finished the puzzle last night, with three new insights.

 

1.    As you near the end, the choices are fewer and it’s easier to find where the final pieces fit. An apt metaphor for the wisdom of those who age with intention and grace, trading the diminishment of the body for the enlargement of the soul and clarity of one’s life purpose. 

 

2.    There were some four pieces that baffled me for so long, unable to see clearly where and how they could ever fit in. Then the simple trick of turning it sideways and Voila!

 

3.    I said I finished the puzzle, but actually one piece was missing. Where did it go? (Ironically, the piece was part of the title Gone with the Wind!)

So perhaps a good reminder that we are never wholly finished. Think of the teacher in the Orff Approach, always approaching some sense of perfection, but never wholly arriving. Likewise, the jazz musician. In Buddhism, they say that even Buddha is still working on himself somewhere. So both a clear statement that we never are truly finished and that we need to keep searching for the piece.