Grand derangement

Little kids in America enjoy playing with simple puzzles. Some are made of wood where the knobbed pieces don’t interconnect but are merely set into a carved out spot on a board with the same shape as the puzzle piece. These puzzles usually have a theme. A shapes puzzle might have a colorful round piece and a square piece and a triangular piece. An animal puzzle might have a lion and a tiger and a giraffe and a hippopotamus. A weather puzzle might have a cloud and a sun, a gust of wind and a forecaster with a yellow rain slicker on his or her head. Toddlers do not yet have fully developed fine motor skills and are challenged and entertained just by the task of putting the piece upright into the matching space.

As we get older, puzzles become more complex. The pieces interlock. The animals may fit within a complex jungle environment. A popular American puzzle for grade-schoolers is of sturdy cardboard with a glossy map of the United States in varied colors; each piece is in the shape of one or more of the 50 states.

The bigger we get, the smaller and more numerous the pieces in the puzzles we put together. Five hundred or thousand piece jigsaw puzzles are not uncommon, and are sometimes complicated by ‘trompes d’oeil’ or sections of solid color where it’s mainly the shapes of the pieces that matter, with few other visual clues. Some enthusiasts will spend weeks putting together large puzzles with beautiful or intriguing images – or three-dimensional puzzles of famous architectural landmarks such as the Taj Mahal.

The puzzles of life – our personal puzzles, or those that are world-wide - can become even more challenging. Imagine a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces flying around you. You grab at them as they float slowly by – or faster and faster – and try to connect them in a way that makes sense. Now think of a game with pieces from several puzzles flying around, mixed with a number of pieces that don’t fit at all. In life, we might call that a ‘grand derangement’. Some players might work on finding the pieces to one little corner, and ignore the rest. Others might try first organizing the pieces in stacks to discover how many puzzles there are.

No point in worrying or being hard on yourself for not having these puzzles solved. One possibility is that just solving a small puzzle might bring about a solution to the larger. Another is that solutions come through assembling the network of pieces in unintended creative ways. What if just grabbing a handful of chips and a glass of beer while the pieces fly around works best? With a grand derangement, nature, given time and minimal interference, may just recompose itself.