You Just Need to Place the Next Piece

My wife and I have lately started doing a lot of puzzles. We began with some really trippy ones. The kind you look at and immediately think, How am I ever going to finish this? They’re incredibly hard. The colors, the overlapping shapes, the tiny characters buried inside the chaos. It’s almost overwhelming. When you first spread all the pieces out, it doesn’t even feel possible.

At the beginning, there’s no clear path forward. Everything looks like an indecipherable tangle. You can’t see the final image, and your brain struggles to imagine how all these random fragments could ever come together into a cohesive picture.

But then you just start. You lay everything out. You find the edge pieces first. You begin grouping colors, patterns, small familiar shapes. You don’t solve the whole thing at once. You solve this little section. Then another. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, progress begins to happen. One piece clicks. Then a few more. The picture starts to emerge.