Puzzles and Existence

The unexamined life is not worth living - I suppose any first year philosophy student has heard that one, right? Even so, I come back to it, perhaps because I heard it as an impressionable first year philosophy student many years ago. At 20, what do you have to even examine? Life has seemingly just begun and will continue for the foreseeable future. That's not always true, though, is it?

My husband lost a dear friend recently. He was 38. 

Something like 700,000 people just in the U.S. have died in the last year and a half from the coronavirus. They have been young and old and everything in between. 

Puzzles have been one constant in recent times. I found early in the pandemic that setting the pieces on the table, arranging them by color or shapes gave me a sense of direction and a way to order the chaos that was all around. Puzzles came to take on a greater significance. It’s hard to explain - maybe they always had this significance and I just never noticed it before. 

Perhaps the most memorable puzzle of the last year was the Sun, by Blue Kazoo. It’s a 1000 piece circular puzzle, 30” across and mostly red. I think that the image is a composite of photos taken by Nasa satellites, though I might have made that up.

                                   

                                                             

This puzzle is round, so that’s weird. It’s also not cut in a traditional way - the shapes are unusual which makes it hard to sort but also hard to put together. As I worked on this puzzle, I got lost in the color, the shapes, and the form it was taking. It probably is the hardest puzzle I have ever put together - so hard that I glued it together and framed it once it was done. 

There was a small catastrophe in between completing the puzzle and framing it . . . I was anxious to start a new one, so I needed my table. My husband offered to get a piece of wood and we would just move the puzzle to the wood while it awaited the frame. As you might imagine, this did not go as planned. The puzzle crashed to the ground, broken into hundreds of pieces. My brain shattered when this puzzle crashed. I could hardly see - in fact, I just took off and went for a walk around the block. My husband stayed behind and put together what he could, bless him. 

Why did my brain shatter when the puzzle shattered? Why did the completion of this puzzle matter? 

I don’t know that I have an answer to that question just yet. As I recall from the story, examining your life isn’t something you do just once. It’s done over and over and over, many times. I don’t know if it’s in the examining that we find meaning or if the meaning is there and we find it by examining. 

                                               

I find this same question comes up when I put together a puzzle. There are pieces that fit together in a certain way and only by examining them do I find where they fit. I think of it sometimes as getting to know the puzzle. I’ve heard there are competitions to put together the puzzle the fastest. To me, that defeats the point. I take my time, sometimes weeks or even months and I painstakingly see every piece. I know sometimes when I pick up the piece exactly where it goes. Other times, many times while working the Sun, I have no idea where the piece goes. But here’s the thing: it goes somewhere. 

Maybe that’s the meaning that shattered: I found where things were supposed to go and it all fell apart. I want there to be a place that things are supposed to go - I want there to be meaning and beauty and I want it to take time. I thought a lot about that when trying to even fathom the number of people who have lost someone close to them during the pandemic, be it from the virus or something else. There's a fragility to existence that I see in completing puzzles. It could all fall apart in an instance. 

I remember Sarte's maxim, Existence Precedes Essence. I believe this to be somewhat embodied by the puzzle. Only in completing the puzzle do we see what it means. However, it’s in completing it that we learn about it and that existence itself matters. 

Existence itself matters, even if it all falls apart. Puzzling existence over and over and over. For now.