This post was inspired by a conversation with Fran a few weeks ago. I forget what we were discussing, but I realised I was struggling a little to follow what she was telling me. Fran hates being interrupted because it breaks her train of thought, so I did my best to figure things out without asking for clarification. On this occasion I guessed right, and our conversation continued unimpeded. Afterwards, I joked with her how it’s often like that when we’re talking. She’ll give me a few snippets of information without making clear how they relate or how she feels about them. “It’s like you give me two or three pieces from a 2,000 piece jigsaw and expect me to figure out what the picture is!” She laughed. “But you do it so well!”
It got me thinking about how we put things together more generally, and about seeing — or discovering — the bigger picture.
When I was growing up in Liverpool, one branch of my mother’s family was heavily into jigsaw puzzles. It wasn’t uncommon to visit and find a puzzle set out on a side table or lap tray. I can still recall my aunt leaning over a puzzle, piece in hand, searching for its place in the whole. I still know a few people who enjoy jigsaws. (Hi, Louise!)
I never saw the appeal. It’s not creative. You’re just reassembling the pieces the original image was cut into by someone else. (In reality, a die-cutting machine in a factory.) There’s no surprise. You know what the solution will look like, because it’s right there on the box lid. It’s also impermanent. Unless you intend to frame and display the completed puzzle you’ll break it up again and put the pieces back into the box.
Clearly, I was missing something.
It’s not creative, no. At least, not in the sense of creating something new, that’s never existed before. A jigsaw puzzle isn’t creative in the way a painting, pencil sketch, journal entry, story, blog post, piece of music, or dance is. But maybe I’m focusing on the wrong thing. The completed puzzle itself isn’t art (I’d assert) but the process of completing it can be. The act of doing it, on this day, under these circumstances, the journey you take towards its completion, is unique, new — and creative. It was never completed precisely this way before and never will be again.
I said there’s no surprise in a jigsaw, because you know the picture you’re aiming for in advance. That’s also true, but as with creativity, focusing on the lack of surprise is to miss the point. If you’re looking for excitement, a jigsaw puzzle is a poor bet. But we can’t live on the novel and exciting all the time. There’s a place for the mundane.
Conversations — even whole relationships — sometimes feel a bit like working on a jigsaw puzzle you’ve done a hundred times before. They follow well-worn patterns and you know where they’re heading long before you get there. I’ve written about such scripted conversations before. I have a few that are like that sometimes. I think we all do. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There can be a sense of comfortable familarity going over the same ground, like watching a movie over and over, or rereading a favourite novel even though you know what’s coming up. Familiar or mundane activities can provide a welcome distraction from our responsibilities, concerns, and worries. They allow us to rest our minds and occupy our bodies for a while. Jigsaws don’t work for me, but I’ve used simple ball or tile sorting games on my phone in that way sometimes. The lack of surprise, excitement, or any real goal is part of their utility.
And even scripted conversations are necessarily new each time they’re repeated. That oh-so-familiar pattern has never been exercised this way before. The words may be the same but today’s conversation is unique precisely because we’re both different than we were the last time we trod this familiar conversational path.
I mentioned that one objection I had to jigsaw puzzles is that the end result is impermanent. How long do you leave the puzzle out once you’ve completed it before breaking it up and putting the pieces back in the box? An hour? A day? I saw an online advertisement the other day for a binder for storing completed puzzles. The idea was to slide each puzzle into its own transparent sleeve, so you could flip through them like a book. The comments section was a revelation to me. Many people, clearly avid puzzle solvers, were keen in principle but felt the sleeves weren’t rigid enough to prevent the puzzles from breaking up. Many said they laminate, glue, or frame completed puzzles as a testament to the effort it took to complete them. I had no idea this was a thing. I wonder if my aunt’s attic was filled with completed puzzles, pieces glued in place, stacked in memory of the times she and her family worked on them together. Memorializing the image itself might seem pointless (why not just frame the lid of the box?) but I can see the value in preserving it as a record of the process.
The conversation analogy would be recording or transcribing what was said. Fran and I have never done so, but we’ve thought of it on occasion, usually after an especially interesting conversation when it would be useful to have captured exactly what was said rather than relying on our memories or brief notes. The closest we’ve come would be the various podcasts we’ve taken part in, including these with Stigma Fighters founder Sarah Fader, award-winning health writer and blogger Diane Atwood, and Steven Hesse for Geek Apocalypse.
Having thought this through, I feel far more charitable towards the jigsaw community! (The correct term for someone who enjoys jigsaw puzzles is dissectologist, which conjures unpleasant memories of school science labs.) I don’t feel the need to complete one myself but it forms a useful analogy for how we all navigate our way through life.
I’ve read that jigsaw manufacturers use the same die cutter for different puzzles of the same size. In principle, you could mix and match pieces from several different puzzles and come up with something totally unique. Maybe that’s how life is. We’re seldom if ever given all the pieces we need to complete the image we have of how we’d like our lives to be. Sometimes it feels like we’re been handed pieces from several different puzzles, unsure which to focus on or what piece belongs where. We can nevertheless work to assemble the pieces we’re given into something unique and meaningful to us. Who cares if the end result doesn’t perfectly match the pretty picture on the box?
I love conversations with Fran precisely because I’m not always given all the pieces. She doesn’t do it deliberately to confuse or annoy me! Maybe she doesn’t have all the pieces either. Maybe there’s no picture on the box, or there’s no box at all and we’ve lost half the pieces. Maybe those two or three pieces of hers are just what I need to fit with these pieces of mine. The challenge — and the fun — comes from taking up the pieces we’re given, offering them to each other, keen to see what happens when we fit them together.
Photo by Vardan Papikyan at Unsplash.
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