The puzzle pictured above kicked my arse. It’s a thousand pieces, which is my puzzle-making preference – very challenging, but not so challenging that it turns the corner from fun to frustrating. It also has definite “zones” in it – the writing at the top, the young mother, the guy with the ball cap, the baby in the carriage, the gnome selling his mushrooms (my favorite part of this puzzle!) – which is my preferred type of puzzle picture. Again, the distinct zones help keep things on the fun side for me. Finally, when I viewed it on Amazon it seemed to have distinct colors – also a must. I’m very picky about the puzzles I buy. I can scroll through 50 pages of offerings on Amazon and only come up with two or three that I would actually want to make. This particular puzzle made the cut.
Then I unboxed it.
Another preference I have is that the pieces be oddly shaped, or at least distinctly shaped in some way (some with all prongs facing out, some with spade shaped appendages, etc). This is something that is just luck-of-the-draw, because none of the puzzle descriptions on websites or even on the box mention puzzle piece shapes. The pieces of this puzzle were all shaped seemingly identically. Moreover, the colors that had seemed so distinct on Amazon were actually mostly various shades of mud or purply gray. I very nearly put the pieces back in the box before starting. But start I did, and before long I was completely engrossed in the task at hand.
Obsessed, more like.
For the last week I have spent every free moment working on the puzzle. My days have consisted of working, walking, eating, and puzzling. That’s a bit of an exaggeration. Of course I have still called my mom each day, texted and messaged friends, watched a movie with Sam and Chris. But other things that bring me joy went by the wayside during my puzzle obsession. Very little writing for this blog, no letters sent to friends holed up in their COVID-free bubbles, not much cooking/baking, not as much just hanging out with Chris as I would have liked. My life felt out of balance. I knew it was out of balance, but instead of deciding to limit my puzzle making to an hour a day or something sensible like that, I said to myself, “I’m just going to push on through and then I’ll take a little break from puzzles when this is done.” Of course, that turned the last couple of days of making the puzzle into the puzzle-making equivalent of the marathoner’s heartbreak hill. It was nuts, really.
Maybe during these coronavirus lockdown times this type of loss of balance is common. I know that some people are spending much more time watching and reading the news than they ever have in their lives. We live in 24-hour news cycle times that are now actually filled with significant new things happening around the clock. You would think that substituting making a puzzle for obsessively watching the news would be a positive trade, that it would result in less stress. And it did. Initially. But balance is about having a variety of things going on in your life, and I learned that “too much of a good thing” is really not a good thing.
So, the puzzle is done and I am going to take that little break that I promised myself. I’m going to reset my internal operating system and bring myself back into balance. Write a few letters. Get some blog posts written. Make that banana bread. Take some photos. Sit on the bench in our back yard and watch the birds. Watch a TV show with Chris.
I hope you’ve found balance in your shelter-in-place days. Above all, I think we need to be kind to ourselves right now. None of us has faced this before and we’re all just making it up as we go along. So, if things get a little off-kilter in your life, I hope you can gently nudge yourself back to the right path with compassion and understanding.
Love,
Michelle xoxo