Puzzles

For about thirty years of my life, between the ages of ten and forty, I didn't really grasp the point of jigsaw puzzles. As a young child, I gained pleasure from my ability to match shapes and colors, but as I approached my teenage years, I began to wonder about their end goal of reassembling something that was taken apart seemingly at random.  My mother still enjoyed them, and I enjoyed going with her to the local frame shop to get them mounted and framed to decorate our basement, but I preferred other ways to spend my leisure time (and my learning time).

One of my favorite activities was debating thorny philosophical and political issues with my friends and family. We could spend hours discussing ideal policies and projecting possible outcomes, imagining futures and testing them against each other. 

But now that I've reached middle age, I have a new appreciation for the sense of calm that comes from reassembling a whole from its parts, the certainty that accompanies the knowledge that the goal is clear and contained. Most of life isn't like that. Historical processes are interconnected. When one problem seems close to being solved, its solution has already planted the seeds for the next problem. Everything is complicated and often contradictory. As a youth, that complexity excited me. Now, I have more sympathy for the vast masses of humanity who are scared and overwhelmed by it. If our puzzles don't have clear solution, ends that we can foresee and embrace, many of us would prefer to spend our time doing something else.

And yet, we are a species that loves to solve solvable problems. Putting together furniture, teaching a child how to tie a shoe or ride a bicycle, mastering a recipe. All of these everyday tasks offer the promise of completion and utility. What overwhelms are the ends we cannot see. 

Perhaps, that's the puzzle at the heart of Judaism. Adonai Echad. There's a "oneness" when you put together all the pieces, and the "oneness" is contains everything, even your desire to see it. And yet, it is impossible to see most of the time. What we can see looks like chaos and contradiction. It looks like competition for power and struggle for survival. The small rituals that bring joy and comfort can seem sad and insignificant because they run up against energies flowing in the opposite direction. Entropy is everywhere.

Still, if we can find that joy in the small tasks that can be completed-- a basketball game, a cup of coffee, a jiu jitsu class, a novel-- maybe there's a way to forgive the world for its complexity. And in that forgiveness, maybe we/I can find peace.