I love a jigsaw puzzle. I find it stimulating and relaxing in equal measure, similar to reading. There’s a high level of satisfaction in completing one, too.
Yesterday evening I started doing a puzzle. It’s an image of the London Underground map, or rather it’s an image of the wider Transport for London (TfL) map, so includes the Overground lines and Croydon Tramlink. The entire border of the puzzle is a collection of all the different roundels that TfL uses, or has used.
I was thinking about it today as I was out for a walk with the dog.
I started to think about it as I wanted to get today’s writing and work done so I could sit down and start working on finishing it. The outer edge pieces are all in place, so it’s just the middle ‘map’ that I need to get done.
However, I had two thoughts that I want to come back to – two of many thoughts about many things that I need to get around to writing – but they feel relevant to me:
- Boundaries are set in jigsaw puzzles, but I’ve learned to question any boundary judgement and so I got to wondering whether jigsaws that have no percieved edge was possible; if so, what would it look like?
- The TfL map is something I know well; however, when I break it up into 1000 tiny pieces, I start to look at it in new ways. This is similar to how I might think about a problem, how it comes together and in which order (process) or how things relate to one another and what that means for the situation in front of me (systems thinking). I might also consider shuffling things around to see how they might fit together, or look for meaningful patterns to see if that can help me (in this instance, I noticed very quickly that it was easier to build out the roundels and then the straight edge rather than what might be considered the ‘traditional’ way of approaching a jigsaw puzzle).
Ultimately, puzzles are not just good for my mental health, they’re good for thinking about how I work, why I work the way I do, and what I can learn from not doign things the way that seems the best from the outset – or be prepared to shift my methods intentionally.
Jigsaw are frameworks, then? Or they’re like maps? Which likely means they’re both.