This article inspired me: “42 Benefits of Doing Jigsaw Puzzles – Thinking Skills and Problem Solving” to write this:
“I love it when a plan comes together”
…we say we hate clichés, but we actually love these, and we love the moment when we recognise these. Because it reinforces our learnings and it builds our trust in many things to be what they are, so we can (at least believe) we have some kind of control on the world around us. The more patterns we recognise the least new unexpected and maybe scary things surround us, so we feel in comfort in recognition.
A movie with a happy end, we say they are stupid and predictable, but some level of predictability in life is needed, so we can focus on the matters we need to address. In many games, this desire of pattern recognition is trained and skilled and practiced, and we feel rewarded in being able to make prediction, but even more we experience the progress in recognising other patterns and more layers of patterns.
World champion in a game once said he had to stop playing, since he started to experience him being able to predict his opponents behavior zo good, that he believed he was able to do this in real life to… in traffic. Until it hit them, he was NOT in same level of control in real life as he was in the virtual game life, and not being able to distinct this competence made him stop playing completely.
Seeing the bigger picture, pieces coming together and see unexpected matches falling in place, the older I get the more insights on the final picture or image which represents me and my life in the bigger context I get. At times one needs to take a distance from their puzzle to allow a fresh perspective on things, play can provide different lenses and allow people to change the perspective opposite. Typical how people have different methods in putting a jigsaw puzzle together, some start with the corners and borders, some leave the empty blue skies for last, some see the challenge to do that first… But seeing the match of two pieces after trying to figure how to get them together… or finding the missing piece in between an almost finished part… Is so exciting, rewarding, gratifying, puzzling, bewondering moment to just enjoy and reflect on… or celebrate soulfully.
My puzzle might never be completely finished, or I trust I will finish only when I die…