Puzzle Alignment

Waking up, to me, every morning includes a self assessment. I do it every day. Its not, do I have all fingers on this hand? Do I have the same on the other? Okay, good. It’s a mental checklist. Before I shared this with my wife, I thought everyone ran through some amalgamation of my ritual. For 47 years I have performed the task of how my overall mannerism reveals itself. It is like putting on underwear, I just do it every day. To my wife, it was an epiphany. It was like wearing underwear on your head daily. She was shocked! I don’t know anyone who does this. I’ve never heard of such a thing. It must be daunting.

My morning mental assessment is like a jigsaw puzzle in progress. There are those pieces that fail to fit anywhere. You think you’ve tried them in all the spaces but you haven’t. There is a home for each one. Now, the tough part of my analogy is; it’s a daily conundrum. The first order of the day is the one that sets the tone. Each unplaced puzzle piece doesn’t have shape on one of its sides until the morning. It’s as if that key piece wasn’t finished while I slept. So, you can’t place that critical piece in the puzzle because you don’t know what it looks like. Furthermore, the corresponding imprint on the puzzle’s grey back frame has not been formed to act as guide. That imprint, fashioned the night before, was overlooked some how.

On bad days, part of the puzzle piece or its corresponding outline has failed to be completed. What is left to do is only a best guess. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. This is where I become a craftsman. There are tools/coping skills that get you through the day, sometimes. One can always replace the appropriate piece with a piece that almost fits. That is a resource that I have used and the day goes by okay, but just by the skin of my teeth. The piece will be taken up and replaced by the appropriate once it is completed. Then there is the exacta knife method. A piece of the puzzle that is perfectly appropriate in its own home is uprooted first thing in the morning. With surgical precision it is morphed into the rendering of the piece needed. Trouble is, I’m not a surgeon and there are untidy edges or misshapen parts. The other downside to this method is that I am left without a piece somewhere else and it will never be replaced. Where once was a fitted piece, no shape remains. Additionally, at some point in time, the late production of today’s puzzle piece may arrive to replace the sculpted piece. Before a sculptor creates his “David in marble” there are failed attempts that must be discarded. Those are days that don’t go so well. The last technique is one we all have used as children in puzzle assembly. An unused piece is forced into a position it was not made for. If it is surrounded by other pieces then it is hammered in. This results in a broken puzzle piece that can never be used again and never takes the form of the location it was so violently coaxed it into. Those are the days when I need help.

Of course there are the good days. Each puzzle piece for the day is there when I wake up. The mirrored matching imprint on the puzzle’s frame is engraved and the only task at hand is to marry the two together. Those days are the best, the healthiest, the most mentally stable, and the ideal ones that come all too infrequently to us all. More often, the production of the day’s puzzle pieces are latent but still arrive. Or, the puzzle frame has not been imprinted but one still is able to fit the pieces in the correct order. Order in the day, that’s what puzzle pieces represent. In their neat and tidy but complexly, obtusely, misshapen way, they project an image of our life, so far. It’s the actual chronology of events, records of emotions and feelings, files of self professed facts, to do lists of what remains, enhancements and enlargements of what we wished occurred, laundry lists of unwashed regrets, and the unfamiliar places we dare to venture.