Jigsaw Puzzles

353 Marbles  

Love is like a puzzle. When you're in love, all the pieces fit but when your heart gets broken, it takes a while to get everything back together.

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    My daughter and I are doing a lot of jigsaw puzzles before bed these days.  We like it – we’re spending quality time together working toward a common goal and it's non-competitive (unlike board games).  For me, it’s become a bit of a meditation similar to the Buddhist sand mandalas.  Like the mandalas, the puzzles take days to complete and they are destroyed at the end as a lesson in impermanence (as if we need another lesson on impermanence after a breakup). 
    Our meditation starts with a box of loose puzzle pieces – 500 of them usually.  Initially, it’s a bit overwhelming, but we’ve developed a bit of a system:
1.  Flip over all the pieces
2.  Pick out the edge pieces
3.  Frame the puzzle
4.  Work on the inside, piece by piece, until we reach our goal – a complete picture of the whole
   Jigsaws get me thinking about relationships and our search for "the perfect fit."  Sometimes when I’m fitting a jigsaw piece, it will seem to fit perfectly but when we near completion it becomes apparent that something’s amiss.  We’ll examine the puzzle and find the misfitted piece that has thrown off the whole puzzle. What seemed like the perfect fit, in time turned out not to be.  Hmmm, sounds familiar. 
    In real life, we’re all a bit like puzzle pieces.  In a relationship, we hook up with another piece.  Initially the fit may work but when we grow, the edges morph.  In the successful relationship, the edges between the two pieces shift through growth without compromising the fit.  When the edges remain too rigid, the fit no longer works and the pieces fall apart. 
   There’s nothing sexy about doing jigsaws.  It’s not like you’d put “jigsaw puzzles” as an interest on a dating website, unless you’re in the Senior’s category.  But maybe the Seniors are onto something.  There’s something soothing about starting with an amorphous mess and systematically and intuitively creating a complete whole.  It’s the theme of my life right now - creating a whole out of all the pieces. 
    A strange thing has happened both times my daughter and I completed a puzzle.  With her younger brother playing around us, one piece inevitably goes missing.  My daughter says, “The missing piece is my Dad.”

Can you find a hobby/artistic outlet that satisfies an urge to create something whole out of  pieces?  Consider building, mosaic work, sewing, even jigsaws.  It is soothing to work in the physical realm with what you are navigating through in the emotional and spiritual realms.