I love to do jigsaw puzzles. I also love to listen to music, read, write, lift weights, watch documentaries, throw/catch baseballs, kiss and lay like spoons with the Angel, post on this website, I guess there’s not really an end to a list of things I love to do. I used to love making mixtapes, but they don’t exist anymore (which is terribly disappointing). Anyway, I find that puzzles are a space where the volume gets turned down on the world, and I can patiently focus.

Last night (while laying like spoons with the Angel, which I love), I wondered if I was getting significantly dumber. I lose more board games than I win nowadays (I my oldest son demolished me in a Boggle game 34-2 last week…34-2!??!), sometimes can’t find the words I know I want to use, forgot to pay the heating oil bill for 3 weeks, and my taxes still sit undone on my desk. I used to be very, very good at Boggle. Now, apparently, I can barely make 3 letter words at all. My explanation (rationalization, justification, hollow excuse) is that, while I don’t cry as often as I used to, my overwhelmed heart mainly stays silently inside, moving furniture and making a mess of me. I still feel the emotions, but they manifest differently, which might be using more and more capacity of the whole of me that I am finding some things, like winning word games or remembering which average cult documentaries I’ve already watched, difficult to navigate. Puzzles help to process feelings and breathe.

Kaizen is a principle where small, almost imperceptible, changes add up over time to complete transformation. Here’s a good example: If you eat a family size pack of Oreo cookies, and you don’t really want to anymore, you might try to cut out Oreos. This is not always a terrific idea, because (in simplistic terms) we miss it and go back . Kaizen says we eat a family size pack minus 1. We won’t ever miss 1 cookie. And then, we eat that pack minus 2. In this way, we build new roads in our minds until we’re eating the 1 or 2 cookies and not missing the rest. (This is the opposite of getting fit/healthy by just taking a massive axe to all of the carbs, sugars, and breads while planning 3 hour workouts every day…and failing by day 3) I find 2 puzzle pieces that fit and that’s a small win, in an ocean of 2000. But I keep finding 2 that fit, and eventually, a beautifully crisp picture takes shape. It’s like culture or government or anything. We can’t re-create the entire world today, we just find 2 pieces that fit until it’s new. We wake up & discover there are new roads in our collective mind.

We can’t reconnect in our marriages all in a moment or a day, we simply show up in a small way now, then another way tomorrow, and soon we have this awesome Spider-Man scene that I finished yesterday and is on my table now. We don’t begin a lasting prayer time by locking ourselves in a room for 2 hours each morning at 4am. Instead, we start with a minute or 2 today, and again, roads are built and the whole puzzle comes into view, and we are praying like crazy.

It’s a method I use to clean out the mess in my head/heart/soul so I can continue to show up in the way I want to show up, in the way you (or anyone) need me to show up, to build new roads and re-wire the world. It doesn’t matter if I get more than 2 points or know the right words, it only matters that I’m playing and listening. It doesn’t matter if my feet are cold, it matters that they’re where they’re supposed to be. Nobody cares if we can hold a tune, it only matters that we sing.