The Joy of Puzzles

My family has put a few puzzles together in the last few weeks. I didn't know my children were so good at this, but they all seem to be really talented at finding those patterns and making the pieces come together. It has been a lot of fun. The craziest one we did was a thousand piece puzzle of a bunch of sea-life. There was enough ocean in there (plenty of blue pieces) that it was pretty challenging to put it all together. We actually gave up on a smaller puzzle because the pieces were so similar that it was difficult to know whether you had connected pieces correctly. Some of them seemed to fit, but you'd find out later that they couldn't go together. That combined with a bunch of blue sky pieces of the same shade and we had had enough.

I don't know exactly why I get a kick out of putting those puzzles together, but the best part of it has been doing them as a family. It's fun to see a bunch of meaningless puzzle pieces eventually come together to create a beautiful picture. The seemingly disjointed parts somehow form a coherent whole and, although it takes a lot of work, it's very satisfying when you see it all come together.

I think truth is sort of like a puzzle. We're thrown into this life without an instruction manual. All we have to start with is our sensory inputs and somehow, we combine those over time into some coherent understanding of the world around us. As we grow, our rational capabilities begin to develop and we seem to be capable of understanding things on a different level than is available only through senses. Truth seems to be one big ugly, nasty puzzle, but as you start to put the pieces together and the picture begins to emerge, it becomes a fascinating project to see if you can piece it all together and find out what that final picture looks like.

I believe that all truth is interconnected. Truth that is found by studying the field of psychology may be related to truth discovered by studying history or religion or philosophy or science or masonry or carpentry or any number of other worthwhile fields. The connection may not be immediately obvious, but if we study it out, those connections can provide as much utility as understanding the individual truths themselves. I think if we could just capture a mental model of the whole truth (I picture it as a crystal with a complicated lattice structure), I think we would perceive a remarkably beautiful gem that would serve as a measure for us when we experience new things or conceive new ideas.

I've started to catch a glimpse of this beautiful thing called truth and it gives me a lot of joy to discover new truths and find how they're connected to the truths I already perceive. I'm also careful to constantly re-examine the truths I've uncovered to see if I may have misunderstood them in some way and come up with a more pure mental model of this precious gem. Someday, I think I'll perceive it, but I don't think I'll get there before I die. But the joy is in the journey and this puzzle offers the greatest challenge and the greatest reward. Thankfully, like the puzzles on my dining room table, my family and I are trying to assemble this one together.