A New View

Aaaand I’m back to doing jigsaw puzzles – a suitable use of time for the convalescent, right? When my sister came to stay with me at the beginning of my recovery, she brought some puzzles with her. She left one with me – this Christmas one you see in the picture. I LOVE this puzzle! I have done it over and over and over and over since she left. I suspect this reveals some freakish form of neurosis in me.

Turns out that while we share a love of jigsaws, my sister and I do them quite differently. For one thing, I do the same puzzles repeatedly – the pleasure for me is not as much in discovering the solution as in knowing the solution. (Yeah, I’m weird.) Apparently, my sister rarely does a puzzle more than once. Which is why I got to keep the new Christmas one.

Also, the plastic trays you see there? That’s her idea. She uses small box lids (she brought hers from home), but I grabbed Tupperware lids when she left. It’s a great idea: something to physically separate the pieces, but I can easily move them where I want them – even out of the way entirely, which is handy given that this table is also where I eat all my meals.

Now, this one was a shocker to me: she divides pieces by their shape. (Whaaat??) All the regular pieces in one lid, all the double wings in another, all the double ears in another . . . fascinating! I always divide by color. Never occurred to me to divide by shape.

However, with this particular Christmas puzzle, dividing by shape wasn’t feasible anyway. The pieces are mostly very atypical shapes. And THAT is what I love most about it. So, I’ll see an opening for a piece that should be, say, your usual double-wing – maybe a bit wider than normal, with part of the red gift box in the peg and a lot of dark green at the other end. And I’m hunting for a piece that looks like that but coming up empty-handed. Turns out that I actually need TWO pieces to fill that spot – two bizarre little pieces that fit together to fill that space in a way I would never have predicted. So unique! So unexpected!

SOOO satisfying, people!

So, while I’m waiting out my time until I can go back to life as normal again, I’m stopping every once in a while during the day to work on whatever puzzle I’ve got out . . . and while I work, my brain wanders to some other puzzles I’m dealing with in my life right now: a few students whom I simply don’t know how to educate effectively. They’re atypical; they just don’t fit into the regular classroom mold. Bless their hearts, I love these kids; I just don’t know yet how to help them. I keep analyzing their situations – separating out the parts in one way and then another. I keep looking for new ways to fill their gaps. The hunt is frustrating . . . as I said, I like knowing solutions; the laborious process of discovering them sometimes discourages me.

A couple months ago, I was getting my butt kicked by an old jigsaw I had pulled out from storage. Drove me nuts. I was about to just give up, put it away, and get out one of my favorites again. Then one morning, I sat at a different end of the table to eat my breakfast (with a placemat over a completed part of the puzzle so I could eat on top of it), and the light from the window was shining in at an angle where there was a glare on all the puzzle pieces. I couldn’t see the pictures on them anymore – only their shapes. As I munched my cereal, casually letting my eyes scan over the work in progress before me . . . suddenly, I saw connections. Ah . . . here’s that piece I needed! . . . and there’s that one . . . and this goes here . . . it was amazing, people! When my eyes were blinded to one aspect, the others came into sharper clarity. I needed a new view.

I’m praying for that new view of my students. Change my perspective, Lord. Shine your light brightly here. Blind my eyes to what doesn’t matter so I see clearly what does.

I bet there are a lot of us needing to pray that prayer over something today. Feel free to steal it from me. You're welcome.