Puzzles

For a couple of hours this evening I've been working on a puzzle. It's a picture of owls and baseballs and baseball bats. The pieces take up two card tables. It doesn’t have a straight border - even the edge pieces look like they connect to something. The puzzle comes with five extra pieces which don't fit anywhere.

When I dumped it out of the box a couple of weeks ago I thought it might be impossible. Why not, that was part of the puzzle's title. I started by trying to sort out the baseballs - big, medium, small. Then I had to sort each of those three piles into two more piles - dark and light stitching. There were so many pieces in each pile that the exercise seemed fruitless. Next I began sorting out all the owl pieces. Then pulling out the pieces with large feathers. Then pulling out the large feather pieces that had some piece of an owl's foot. Even though nothing seemed to help, just the act of sorting through things and compartmentalizing parts seemed to be a worthwhile effort. A few of the things I seem to have in abundance are time, persistence and faith. Even though I sometimes have trouble trusting in faith it never seems to fade very far away.

None of the sorting strategies seemed to be paying off in the first couple of weeks. Now suddenly there's a couple of feet together here and there. Owl bodies are coming together, slowly. I no longer have any doubt that the puzzle will come together. I've never considered how long it will take, I've got time to spend on it.

It's kind of a rare night to myself, one in which I can indulge myself with this type of activity. I never work on the puzzle for very long at one time. Maybe five minutes before I take a break to go do something else. Then I gravitate back, wondering which area would be best to focus on for the next few minutes. Today I've put together about a dozen pieces. In any previous effort I was lucky to find two pieces to fit together. It's obvious this is going to take an investment of time, so there doesn’t seem to be any pressure to rush it.

The reorganization of my life seems to unfold in much the same way. I still see Alex once or twice a month. I talk about what's been going on and he asks me questions. In the beginning we'd focused on what I was thinking or feeling in the previous few days - typically it was all about grieving. Later we moved on to the subjects of relationships and dating. The last visit we talked about the things that make me tick. Now when we talk about a topic it seems to have connections everywhere - relationships, work, past, present, future.

I was describing to my friend how the discussions with Alex have evolved. I noted that inbetween appointments many of the smaller issues that now come up in my life I'm able to think through and take care of myself. She asked if this wasn't the point - in all these meetings it hasn't been simply that Alex has wanted to hear me talk. He's been teaching me the process of being inquisitive, of questioning my own thoughts and ideas, of questioning what I'm saying. The revelation really stunned me at first. Of course that's what we've been doing. It's so much more profitable teaching a man to fish than simply feeding him.