Amid all the eating and shopping of the past few weeks, I’ve somehow developed a penchant for jigsaw puzzles. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism for me – a way to withdraw from the frenzy without simply sitting and staring into space for extended periods of time with this expression on my face:
I know the prevailing attitude towards people who puzzle is somewhere between amusement and disdain: it must take a true dullard to sit and stare at one picture for hours on end and extract any level of amusement from the process. I understand.
For me however, it seems to slip my mind into a somewhat meditative state – propelling to the front of my thoughts all kinds of interesting ideas that have been shoved down by work and other amusements over the months. It’s not unlike the way good ideas may come to mind for you while driving or in the shower. For this express reason, doing puzzles is really not a great group activity as far as I’m concerned – it’s more of a solitary pursuit.
It’s also a clever way to get to know some of my favorite paintings – like this Roy De Forest wildness called Country Dog Gentlemen. It’s been one of my favorite paintings for ions, but I’d never noticed all the crazy detail till I had to put it together piece by piece recently.
I also came up with a nifty list of life lessons that I thought were sort of clever based on my recent puzzling adventures. Here they are:
1) Most of the time, the piece you’re looking for looks nothing like you thought it would, and it’s been sitting in front of you the whole time – you just didn’t recognize it.
2) You can swear up and down that some of the pieces are missing, but they always turn up in the end.
3) Proportion is relative – what you think is gigantic often turns out to be teeny – and vice-versa.
4) It’s the puzzle piecing journey, the seeking and discovering, not the end product that’s important – remember after all the hours of piecing you’ll be destroying the whole thing at the end and starting over. (Isn’t that so of life?)
5) Texture, pattern and color variation are far more interesting than blocks of sameness and homogeneity.
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