Jigsaw Puzzles and Faith Crises

I am very good, naturally, at jigsaw puzzles. I just “get it”. It amused my family during my youth, since I sometimes would sit in the living room at a card table and spend all day completing a 1,000 piece puzzle – from start to finish.

One of the things that makes me good at jigsaw puzzles is that I can look at the picture on the box and have it stay in my mind while I am sorting and analyzing the pieces. I don’t get “lost in the pieces” but rather am able to fit them together based on “the big picture” that remains in my mind. For example, when I am working on one particular section (say the sky), I can notice a non-sky piece that is unique and recognize that it goes in a particular place, especially if I worked previously on the section where it goes and missed it the first time.

Another thing that helps is that I can see very fine differences in puzzle pieces – differences in shape and coloring that often are miniscule. I can look at a particular spot in the partially completed puzzle, get an image of the shape necessary to fill that spot, then turn to pieces and find the piece (or pieces, sometimes) that match the shape. I can look at another place where there is a tiny spot or sliver of color (perhaps a piece that is entirely brown except a tiny spot of blue that is imperceptible to my wife and most of my kids) and see that tiny spot or sliver when I look through the pieces.

None of this is anything like the extremes of autism or any other “condition”, but it is at a higher level than most people I know.

Recently, however, I have had an interesting, enlightening experience. After my father-in-law died in November, my mother-in-law gave my wife his ipad – and I have spent some time doing the puzzles that are on it. They range from ridiculously easy to 550 pieces – and the pieces of a 550 piece puzzle on a standard ipad screen are very small. Complicating things is that when they are displayed in a scroll bar on the side of the screen they are significantly larger than they are when they are dragged onto the screen. This causes a distortion in both color and shape that is very disorienting at first.

It hit me today, as I was working on the fifth 550 piece puzzle in the set, that my experience is similar to faith crises / faith transitions in some important ways – and how we should approach new information with other people who are or are not struggling:

1) I did all of the puzzles in the set at each easier level before tackling them at the top level – and there are five levels of difficulty for each puzzle. By doing this, I was able to get a better handle on the overall puzzle (the big picture) and get to the most difficult version gradually and incrementally. It still was frustrating when what I saw in the sidebar got less and less like what was showing up on the screen (when the distortion was magnified), but it was nowhere close to what would have occurred if I had tried to dive into the most difficult version without the preparation of doing the easier versions first.

2) It took working on the third 550 piece puzzle before my eyes and brain began to adjust naturally to the “distortion” I mentioned above. Suddenly, I realized that my eyes and brain were beginning to “translate” the pieces from the sidebar onto the screen in a way that made sense to me – that “enduring” and not quitting when things first got wonky had enabled me, literally, to start seeing the pieces AND the puzzle differently. By the time I finished the fifth one (today, shortly before starting this post), it had become quite natural.

3) Having said that, it still is harder for me to do that level of puzzle on an ipad than it is for me to do the exact same puzzle at standard size and with the ability to pick up each piece, bring it closer to my face and touch the edges and contours of shape. I now am quite good at the ipad puzzles – but it’s not the form I enjoy the most. I am comfortable with it, but, if I had the choice, I would do standard, tangible puzzles over ipad puzzles every time. They simply aren’t as difficult or frustrating, I enjoy them more and I would take less difficult or frustrating and more enjoyable if I could. However, I really do love jigsaw puzzles, isolated from all of the other issues of form and structure, so I’m not going to give up jigsaw puzzles just because a more difficult version is the only version available to me at the moment.

4) Final note: I still refuse to do 2,000 piece snowscapes – or large, two-sided puzzles – or any other puzzles that are so complicated that they aren’t worth the time, effort and frustration it would take for me to finish them. I am able to continue to love and enjoy puzzles so much not just because I am good at them but also, specifically, because I refuse to work with puzzles that would destroy that love and enjoyment.

I just thought I would share those things and open up the thread for discussion.