The world in 4,000 pieces

Bethany Lange, Herald Reporter
Posted 7/18/17

Bethany Lange column for July 18, 2017

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The world in 4,000 pieces

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There’s something soothing about the soft “snick” of a puzzle piece falling into place. 

Since around Easter, I’ve been working with my family to put together a 4,000-piece map of the world, complete with flags, countries, oceans, seas, rivers, gulfs, islands, oceanic ridges and basins, atolls, ocean currents, wind, maximum ice drift lines, mountain ranges, longitude and latitude lines, and more. 

The interesting thing about puzzles is that they are really good life lessons. They are all about putting a broken image back together, which requires prioritization, planning and patience (although the pieces will never meld together even when the picture is reconstructed, which just goes to show that we can put the pieces of our lives back together but scars do remain.) 

Plus, you have to know which rules you can break. 

There are a lot of “rules” you can break with puzzles, and some you can’t. Prioritization is a great example of this. One of my favorite “fake rules” is to start with the edge pieces. The first step in most puzzles I put together is to sort all the pieces by their edges — flat edges in one pile, middle pieces in another. And then narrow down the sorting from there.

But this isn’t an unbreakable rule of all puzzles — not by a long shot! There are puzzles that I’ve started with particularly distinguishing colors or even randomly. 

One puzzle set I own has many unusual piece shapes. Because of this quirk and the identical cut of same-size puzzles, it is possible to put together two 300-piece puzzles just by the shape of the pieces. It’s a fascinating method because you can put a piece in place even if you don’t know where any of the adjoining pieces are. 

Again, though, it goes back to knowing the rules — and the unbreakable rule of puzzles is that, when completed, all the pieces join together to make a particular shape and image. Part of that is that “outie” pieces only interlock with “innie” pieces; and another “rule” is that you can really only put together a limited number of pieces together at a time. 

In real life, that translates to this: We have to work with each other’s complementary strengths, and we can’t solve all the world’s problems at once (although it certainly helps to have people working alongside you). 

And whether you use piece shape, color or trial and error to put the puzzle together, you have to know how puzzles work to be successful and at all efficient. 

Puzzles also require patience. Enormous patience. And the bigger or more monochromatic the puzzle is, the more patience it requires. That ties into planning, too. 

The world map puzzle I mentioned is not monochromatic because of the level of detail, but it still requires a lot of patience to Google hundreds of individual pieces to find out exactly where this city, country, island, coast, river or atoll is in the world. I’ve spent many hours running down my phone battery to single-digit percentage points just with Google. 

It also requires a lot of patience to put together the latitude lines based on where the horizontal line falls in the piece. But, fortunately, that also increases the reward involved whenever a piece locks into place. 

It’s SO much better than video games. 

And then the planning involved in this is awesome, too. I’ve sorted and re-sorted and re-re-sorted to make the process as efficient as possible. Edges; then pieces with flags; then special decorations; then land from sea; then Greenland; then the U.S.; then South America and Africa; then Canada; and, eventually, all the major continents and even some of the bigger countries (I’m looking at you, Russia); then islands; then the kind of text on the oceans... 

When working on the puzzle, I have had to realize — again — how much I’ve always prized order. It’s immensely satisfying to think that everything will work out fine if I just follow the rules, color within the lines, seek perfection, put every piece in its proper place. Obviously, it’s a fallacy because we live in a fallen world and nothing’s ever perfect, but it’s a tempting thought.

Although it can be taken too far, I do still think rule-following has a very real value and should not be cast aside without good reason. The first questions, though, should always be as follows: What are the rules, who/where did they come from and what are they meant to accomplish?

It’s a good idea to go back to the original source when asking about this. Whether it’s traffic laws, social mores, questions of religion or how to solve a math problem, it’s a good idea to figure out where the rules come from. Yeah, that sometimes involves a lot of research, but isn’t it worth it to really know who or what you are really advocating or abrogating?

After all, as I’ve heard many times, you should know the rules before you break the rules. (Although “know” in this instance really has more of a Biblical meaning — that is, you really should have more than a superficial familiarity with them, having fluency and understanding for why they exist before you have the authority and freedom to determine when there’s good enough reason, if any, to break them meaningfully.)

For instance, the 10 Commandments are examples of absolute rules, because when is it ever OK to steal, or to murder, or to be unfaithful? Oh, we can come up with all sorts of reasons why breaking them would benefit us in certain scenarios, but if they’re intended to protect our neighbor, is there any reason why stealing from someone is caring for them as we’re meant to love them? 

But we live in a world of broken rules — broken vows, commitments, laws, relationships, appointments, trust, honor, behavior, dreams, families, pasts, futures, borders and so on. You probably can’t point to a single meaningful and especially intangible thing in your life that has not been broken or marred in some way.

But puzzles are a simple way to think back on the principles of rules and life skills.