Completing Puzzles
These days, in the intense heat of a long, long summer, I spend a lot of time, perhaps even too much, working puzzles. Some of them are word puzzles, like Wordle online, but many are jigsaw puzzles of all types and descriptions: artworks made into thousand-piece mysteries, like Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (which is spread out on my dining table as I write this, with just the edge completed so far); Charles Wysocki paintings of Americana, such as a 1930’s airplane show or a fall pumpkin festival; whimsical pictures of kittens or puppies; Dickensian England shop windows; Parisian street scenes; Venetian canal vistas, Monet gardens, and so on. In addition, I like to tackle Sudoku puzzles, and occasionally I can fight my way through one of the “diabolically difficult” ones to a successful completion!
What is it that makes puzzles so intriguing for so many of us? Not only do we engage in jigsaw puzzle assembly on tabletop and word or number puzzles on paper, but we also seek more exciting things to mesmerize our minds: We read mysteries and other crime fiction, hoping to figure out before the detective does “who done it.” We watch crime stories on television or stream videos where the police are always one step behind the perpetrators for episode after episode. We play video games through levels and levels of physical challenge and violent wars and melodrama. We are mesmerized by podcasts that focus on true-crime stories of horrendous murders or serial killings. We can’t turn off the radio or put down the I-phone when another mass shooting is being reported.
It seems to me that another way to view our completing puzzles is to see it as a way we help our brains to make sense of the seemingly senseless. And that must be something that our brains find satisfying, because I, for one, always feel a sense of relief when the puzzle is completed and the final piece is in place at last. It seems to me, perhaps, that this is what it means for humans to be “created in the image of God.” After all, God’s first act, as recorded in the Hebrew Bible (the “Old Testament”), is creation, or making the created order emerge from chaos. I don’t know what chaos looked like to God, but I imagine a pile of billions of imaginary puzzle pieces all jumbled together, waiting for order to be brought out of the vast stack somehow, so that there would be recognizable (name-able) things that could be identified: Light, Darkness, Day, Night, Sun, Moon, Stars, Water, Land, Plants, Animals, and eventually human beings. And then we go forward 14 billion years or so, and VOILA: we have the everyday jumble of life on Earth as we humans live it!
What might God think of us now? I have no idea. I’d LIKE to believe God sees us (still) as creatures capable of doing good as well as evil, and caring for and about one another, as God surely intended. Sometimes we give little evidence of that, always ascribing the worst of motives to little things others might thoughtlessly do or say, rather than ascribing their actions to lack of sleep or just “having a bad day,” as we more often should.
I can assure you that I, for one, need everyone to be as forgiving as possible the older I get: I forget more than I ever knew; I jump to conclusions that I shouldn’t when friends suggest things; I take offense when someone parks where I had hoped to myself; I expect to find my pew vacant when I walk into church, but it isn’t sometimes and it makes me want to go back home! But instead I need to think of every one of these things as a new puzzle to solve: and solve in a way that helps my brain to make lemonade out of all these lemons and therefore calm itself instead of riling my anger and frustration.
When I forget, it means my brain perhaps needs more sleep, or more exercise, or a checkup! When friends make suggestions, they are most probably trying to be helpful and not just meddling and judgmental. When someone else parks in the last handicap space, maybe they needed it worse that day than I did. When my pew is occupied by someone else, maybe this is my next “best friend,” and I ought to strike up a conversation! After all, when God looked at the chaos, it was not just to “throw in the towel” and go back to playing Sudoku! We too need to look at our lives as a puzzle to be lived, and in the best way we can, by caring for self, caring for neighbors, caring for creation! Be nice to yourself, dear friends, so you can be nice to others. And puzzle away, if it “feeds your brain” the good feelings that soothe your soul through this awful heat!
Annette Citzler is a La Grange native and former professor at Texas Lutheran University.