Healing

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 You see this puzzle here? My youngest gave this to me for Christmas 2018. It’s a collage of photos of me and my girls. I LOVE this puzzle. In our old house, I kept it out on our dining room table so I could stop and mess with it anytime I wanted, and it’s out again on the dining room table here in the new place.

For the past few months, I’ve been doing this puzzle over and over. (You might be able to see how worn it's becoming.) I know it so well, I can pull a random piece out of the box and lay it almost exactly where it goes – and that’s often how I complete the puzzle. Other times, I work from the outside in. From top to bottom, or bottom to top. I tried it upside down a while back – that worked, too. Over and over.

Believe it or not, this is soothing to me. It always has been. When I was a kid, I had a pile of about seven jigsaws that I would do repeatedly in my room, just cycling through the pile when I was bored. And again, I knew them well enough to pick a random piece out of the box and just lay it where it goes. I like other kinds of puzzles, too: Nonograms, Sudokus, Mah Jongg. But I don’t like the really difficult ones. I want it just hard enough to make me focus . . . but easy enough that I get it done in a short amount of time.

When my home life hit crisis levels a few times in the past, I found myself pulling out those old jigsaw puzzles to do in the dining room. Over and over again. Pull out a piece. Lay it where it belongs. This piece goes here. That piece fits there. Over and over and over. It calmed me – settled my thoughts and emotions. And I've only recently figured out why:

1) The puzzle had a solution.

2) I knew the solution.

Maybe in the rest of my life, there are no solutions. Maybe the rest of the day, I’m a pathetic hot mess. But sitting at this table this minute with this pile of chaos in front of me, I am Master of the Mayhem. Queen over the Confusion. I speak the word and the turmoil becomes sweet harmony and order. I know all the answers; heck, I even know the questions. Even if only for the next twenty minutes.

It was a regular confirmation that things do make sense somewhere in the world. And that maybe I was not the complete failure I felt like before I sat down.

This puzzle that I love -- it sat in its box on the dining room table untouched for several days this past week. And I am gratefully seeing that as a sign of healing.

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