Why You Should Do Puzzles

I didn’t do my first 1,000-piece puzzle until a few months before I turned 30. When I was a kid, my grandmother would tell me about them as if they were a mythical American thing.

“Americans sometimes would do these very large puzzles, with very tiny pieces, and at the end, put a glue on top to glue all the pieces together and put them in a picture frame.”

We thought about this together, mesmerized, captivated, at this strange Americanism, and marveled in awe and appreciation at this very difficult hobby.

I ended up liking puzzles because they are a nice metaphor for problem-solving generally and also they themselves are…a puzzle to solve.

What had compelled me to make my first 1,000-piece puzzle was having bought a puzzle. It was beautiful edibles — edibles as in, edible flowers — a puzzle from a bespoke little cooking-books store in New York City — and I thought it was a funny joke to have this object in my home.

And so in having the puzzle, I had a puzzle to do. But first I wanted an easier puzzle, and so I bought an 250-piece “trash can creatures” puzzle, which I bought in a museum and really liked, which was a puzzle of a little skunk and a possum and a pigeon friend.

It took me two nights to do that one, but it could have been one night or three nights depending on desired level of intensity. The 1,000 piece puzzle took a lot longer. Since then, I have done a few interesting puzzles, including a 3-dimensional puzzle ~*~vase~*~.

I got to feel myself have different emotions as I pass the puzzle sitting on the table. The emotions when I just got started were different emotions than in the middle stages and in the endgame.

Feeling the different emotions across time was very important. You could just me mindlessly moving your hands, sorting pieces by color. You could have your mind wandering. You would be actively scanning and trying to figure something out. You could be bringing different levels of intensity to different aspects of it.

There is boredom, frustration, annoyance, joy, greed, delight. All kinds of emotions come up around this one puzzle.

Knowing that the problem is bounded makes it feel like feeling the emotions will have a payoff — that the frustration and annoyance now will probably still mean joy later — and not that much later. That’s why a puzzle with a few pieces missing is such a loathed thing — the rules of the game change and your frustration might just be unbounded.

It took me about a month to finish that first puzzle, and then I did end up doing the glue thing that my grandmother and I fawned about.

I would alternate between doing some kind of 3D puzzle, and doing a more classic flat puzzle.

The flat ones — there are easier and harder ones that are 1,000 pieces. If you want to try one, I would advice finding one that has a picture you would like looking at for a long time. That’s what I did. I liked looking at my edible flowers and liked looking at my trashcan creatures. They were also easier because they had a lot of distinct shapes, unlike for example a Van Gogh puzzle.