Having chronic pain is difficult in itself, but trying to function in daily activities and live a normal life with it can be extremely challenging. Thankfully, I’ve learned along the way that one of the best distractions from it is to do a puzzle.
It’s really funny how the things I once despised are now becoming the things I get a lot of satisfaction from. Puzzles are just one of them. A few years ago, I wouldn’t have been caught dead working on one of them for even a minute of my time. It never made much sense to me how any enjoyment could come from trying to put together something of different shapes and sizes solely for the purpose of forming some kind of random picture. It seemed rather boring and mundane to me as well as a waste of time. Instead, I would spend my free time doing more exciting things like playing tennis, bowling, basketball, swimming, biking, hiking, walking and more. None of that has been possible for quite some time now so I’ve been limited to just a few choices on how I can use all my free time. The idea of a putting together a puzzle wouldn’t have been one of them but last year my roommate had brought out a 1000 piece puzzle that had been sitting in the closet for quite a long time and asked if I wanted to work on putting it together. It was of some ski resort he had visited a long time before. I’m not sure what initially motivated me to sit down at the dining room table where he had dumped out all the pieces but one day something did. By the time I just about had its border completed, I looked at the clock and saw several hours had flown by. What was the most interesting thing to me though was that for those few hours I worked on the puzzle, my only focus was on it and not my pain. Thus began my quest to do one puzzle after another, simply for the purpose of distracting my brain from constantly focusing on the areas of my body that are usually in pain.
Since then, I have completed a 2000 piece Noah’s Arc, a 1000 piece Parisian street, a 1000 piece scene from a home in Santa Fe, and most recently, a 1000 piece of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Every one of them has been different from each other in their shapes, sizes, and colors of the pieces. The last one I just finished proved to be the most challenging of them all for three reasons. First, every piece was exactly the same size as each other. Second, the colors of this puzzle all blended in to each other. And most importantly, third, when I finally came down to the last few hours of working on it, I discovered a single piece was missing. The last thing I ever wanted to face was to have a piece be missing after having spent so many hours, days, and even months working on it. So with this having occurred, I became very angry and realized that unless I could produce the missing puzzle piece, I wasn’t going to be able to have it professionally framed like I had done with all the others. After an exhaustive search, I accepted the fact that either it was lost or missing from the start so I decided to pray on it because I didn’t know what else to do nor did I like feeling so angry about the situation. The solution that came was to go and purchase a second copy of the same puzzle and find the missing piece within it. After another hour of searching in the new puzzle box, it was found and the puzzle was completed.
The moral of all of this is that puzzles require patience, not just to put them together, but also to deal with situations like when a single piece of one goes missing out of a thousand. I never had much of this trait in my life, but working on one of these has surely helped me to develop that. It’s also helped me to develop other traits too like slowing down, being still, and becoming more aware of all of my emotions. I never really thought something as simple as a puzzle could achieve all of this, but then again, I never did give them a chance to find that out either. Either way, I’m just glad God saw better and decided to show me this.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson