Puzzled.

At irregular intervals, about once or twice a year, I am gripped by the compulsion to do a jigsaw puzzle. The obsession always, without fail creeps over me at times when I'm snowed under with work and should really, really, seriously be trying to tackle the mountain of tasks ahead. But it can't be helped. I have to cave in to its power.
Of course there is a much more elegant way of looking at this:
Think of the soothing, healing effect of such a meditative activity: the single-mindedness it requires, the impossiblity of thinking of complicated, "grown-up" things while playing, the orderly, systematic way of progression, watching the picture grow steadily, the reward that lies in the completion after hours of diligent work, the complete uselessness of it (in the purely aesthetic sense of "All art is quite useless.").



Sometimes I wish life was more like such a jigsaw puzzle. I wish that if you felt something was missing, you'd only need to reorganize the pieces and sift through them systematically once more until you found the missing piece.



I wish we could all just have that faith, that confidence to believe that, really, all the pieces we need for a happy, complete life are already here inside us, just waiting to be found and fitted into their rightful place.



I wish we could recognize the beauty of the big picture even in the middle of chaos.