One thousand pieces.
Puzzling my life together.
My dad and I are nerds. Not like, mega-super nerds. We haven’t hacked into a government database (or maybe my dad still intends to have that father-son talk) and we don’t dress up as the Caped Crusader on the weekends. I do, however, have a LEGO portrait of Iron Man still hanging in my childhood room, and Dad has only got about a thousand science fiction anthologies. Our particular brand of fascination is less tied, though, to intellectual properties, and is want, rather, to follow thought-provoking conversations, mentally challenging games and envelope-pushing science and research. It looks like my dad sending me an article on the scientific benefits of barefoot running. It looks like me sending him the music video of a brother-sister band whose confluence of soul and funk seems to be re-shaping the New York music scene. It looks like crosswords and book lists and email chains. When I was a kid, it looked like puzzles, too.
This week was a busy one for me. On Monday I was in Leipzig for the day, catching up with an Irish friend of mine that I first met at summer camp in New York and whom I haven’t seen since. Tuesday through Friday I was at the office; I spent Tuesday evening with my girlfriend just catching up, and then saw her again straight after work on Thursday to go canoeing on a lake near her university. Friday after work I jumped on a train that took me to Hamburg where I woke up this morning. I’ll spend the whole day with a friend, taking photos, and then drive back to Berlin with him tonight. My dad is probably the reason I’m into photography, too. He and Mom got me my first digital camera when I was seven or eight, and it was his old film camera I stole and fell in love with in the last year of university.
There was one puzzle my parents bought me, I can’t remember when, I must have been a pre-teen. It was one thousand pieces. Not only that, but it was a special kind of puzzle made by a Dutch company called Wasgij (which is jigsaw backwards, if you’re having one of those days). The picture on the puzzle we got was of the first Olympic Games in ancient Greece. The tongue-in-cheek, cartoonish illustration depicts boxers and shot-putters dressed in white tunics and horse-drawn chariots racing one another behind them. The thing about Wasgij puzzles is that the picture printed on the puzzle pieces themselves is never identical to the one on the box. Though the box showed the very first Olympic Games, the puzzle was of a modern version of the games. The crowd had cell phones and above the audience seating were billboards with adverts plastered across them. We had to discover this as we went along, of course, since there was no way of knowing what you were building until you were building it. That fit Dad just fine. He didn’t believe in using the box when we built bog standard puzzles in any case. Dad and I expropriated the dining room table and worked on the puzzle for weeks. Constructing the edge was a doddle. Of course, once we were left with only middle pieces, the real work began. It was tricky to match any two pieces together. We began grouping them together according to their colour or pattern. A bit of leopard skin here, a bit of cherry red there. Even so, we’d often seem to be going down the right track, believing we’d locked in one whole section of the puzzle, only to find that about half of the pieces we thought belonged to the hurdler’s green jersey, were lime and not emerald. Back on the pile they went. That’s how we made progress; in fits and starts. Some days I’d only manage to do one piece before school. Some days Dad completed about two dozen pieces after returning home, having walked the dog. Some days neither of us touched it. In the end, though, the thing was finished. We left the puzzle on the table for the weekend before crumbling it together into the box and putting the box in my cupboard.
I’m not really sure how to feel about my life right now. It feels like I’m playing with those pieces again, putting some into place only to realise that they don’t quite fit right, and deciding instead to toss a few back into the pile. I’m not sure how I feel about having such a full schedule. But then, doesn’t the week I’ve had offer the reliability of a schedule with the flexibility of adventure? If how I spend my days is how I spend my life, is this how I want to spend my life? The little kid in me, the puzzle-completionist, wants to see all of the pieces in the right places. I want my house, kitchen, shoes, teeth, job, relationship, savings, to be just so. I don’t why the sense to organise and complete the puzzle of my life is especially strong at the moment. I think it probably has something to do with finally stepping into my career and being fully (or, at least, apparently) independent. Maybe I just need to keep myself busy now that I’ve got the job and the house and the residence permit.
What I came to realise in writing today’s journal, though, is that my dad and I didn’t frame our puzzle. We didn’t even look at it for very long once it was complete. For us, though I may not have known it at the time, the thing that kept us engaged was the solving, not the solution. The fun is in playing with the pieces, turning them over in your fingers, considering how they all fit together. We didn’t rush. We didn’t fret our mistakes. I wonder what I might see if I were to focus on the pieces of my life instead of worrying about what the picture on the box looks like.
I’m slowly nerdifying my girlfriend, too. She’s got the whole book thing covered, now we’re working on watching Star Wars. Her favourite character is Jar-Jar Binks… If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.
Enjoy finding the right piece for the right moment !