Your Only Puzzle

Do you remember your first jigsaw puzzle? You stared at the pieces, stared at the snapshot on the box and did not understand how they ever could be the same. One was square, familiar, linear and known; the others were misshapen, scattered, chaotic and abstract. An almost impossible combination for your three year old mind, wasn’t it? But you grew; the days of the twenty-five piece puzzle left you, you graduated to the thousand piece, and the kind without the picture, and the 3-D type. Hours were spent unlocking the grander secrets of those puzzle pieces, and solving their hidden meaning. Yet we all grow older, and now you’ve all but left your jigsaw puzzle days behind.

To a point, at least.

So what would you say if I told you that there is someone who solved puzzles much past his youth? Devotes his life to the solving actually, or rather devotes his life to the solving of one puzzle. It’s really big, bigger then a snapshot on a box if that counts for anything, and is multi-dimensional and has lots of pieces and has no nice neat picture (in the way you think of a picture) to follow, and all of it is always changing. No one knows exactly what it looks like, right now it’s not fully understood, but we do have an idea.

But then, you don’t yet, do you? You are probably stuck on the magnitude and concept of this puzzle, and I can understand why, if you haven’t seen it….No, if you have not realized that you’ve seen it.

Let me try a different tack, this is the process of solving the puzzle:

1. A piece is selected from random (where he gets his pieces is irrelevant, let’s just call it a metaphorical box).
2. The solver leaves his house and goes off in search of the place for the piece. (This can be a lengthy process, or it can be very short; the search could take him to some place physical or spiritual really anywhere in space or time.)
3. Once the piece’s spot is found, it is taken back to the solvers home and puts the piece of the puzzle exactly in its place.

Ah, but I see you are lost again. Did he not find the place for the piece somewhere else? It is place is out there, not in his home. Yes, this will be hard. Let me say that its location is relative only to the puzzle which is in turn only relative to the picture. But do not worry, maybe we will come back to this.

Imagine yourself holding a jigsaw puzzle piece; note its shape. Is there, in the box, another piece with exactly the same shape? No, this one is unique, individual, its own. Now add the next piece, see how perfectly they fit together? It’s back to high school math now; the pieces have integrated together, two abstracts have led to another. Add another piece, and another, until your puzzle is complete. Did you watch it take shape? Did you slowly see the picture emerge; did you see the square that is the puzzle form? Now look back at that first puzzle piece; does it resemble that square of a complete puzzle? No, but it is still a necessary part; the puzzle cannot be solved without it.

I’ve seen this guy break down into tears when he finds the place for a piece, or burst our laughing, or become enraged. But no matter how he feels, he goes back to his home and places the piece in the spot it, belongs because the solving must continue. He knows where it goes in the puzzle, because he knows where it goes in the picture. And every time, before he places it, he says good-bye to his unique, geometric, mathematical piece; he calls out its name (oh yes, each piece has a name). And then he places it, and its attributes are added to the puzzle and he reaches out, grabs the next piece, and begins to search for its spot.

Do you see the puzzle now?

Do you see his puzzle now? Can you see in his home, on some table a replica of our universe? All the thoughts and concepts and places and people and things that he has placed there? This arithmetical construction, adding abstract to variable to geometric that creates our beautiful, beautiful world?

And can you see where you fit in his puzzle? Can you see you? Can you see your puzzle?