I used to love jigsaw puzzles. I found them relaxing and enjoyable. Now, a majority of my spare time is spent doing jigsaw puzzles. Like, all of the time. I always have a jigsaw puzzle on my coffee table. I pick at it when I am talking on the phone or before I go to bed. I could call it mediative, but it doesn't full qualify for mediation. Mediation fully qualifies for mediation.
I love pizza, but if that was all I ever ate, I'd go crazy. Likewise, jigsaw puzzles. Yet, I can't stop doing jigsaw puzzles. As soon as I finish one, I dig up another box and I start working again. I have about a dozen Liberty jigsaw puzzles and I've done each of them twice since March.
Jigsaw puzzles are a fun way to pass time, but at the end of the day, all I've done is completed a jigsaw puzzle that goes back in the box. I haven't created anything new. I've solved a puzzle someone else created for me to solve, and that was it. Not that everything I do has to be productive, but damn I've spent at least a month of time since the pandemic doing jigsaw puzzles. At some point, it becomes hell.
Almost everyone I know is finding the quarantine for the pandemic tedious. Why are we finding it tedious? Who are these magical unicorns who are not finding it tedious? What is the secret to enjoying the quarantine, thriving in it?
It is embracing the boredom? Will the boredom and isolation push us to find new things to do, to test and experiment with our imaginations?
Who isn't bored?
Pandemic Response Teams
- Covid-testing firefighters who spend their days poking sticks up people's noses until they cry. (The people with the stick up their nose cry, not the firefighters.)
- Scientists working on vaccines
- Health care workers
- Logistical engineers who are figuring out how to deliver frozen vaccines across the county
- Amazon delivery people
- Undertakers
Creative People who Work Alone
- Jigsaw puzzle designers
- Novelists
- Composers
Feel free to add other jobs to the list. But what about the rest of us?
My former manager, Lance, made an awesome desk in his spare time. It is exceptionally cool. (I'd share his blog post about his creative process, but then you'd know who the real Lance is.)
So, did Lance get so bored that he built a desk to cure his boredom, or is he the type of person who never gets bored and always have an idea or forty floating around in his head that he wants to do? Both?
Boredom can inspire us to do something cool, create something fun, whether is a desk, a quilt, a novel, a video called How to be at Home (very cool, from Canada) or whatever.
I, on the other hand, have spent my spare time during the quarantine doing jigsaw puzzles, which feels like an epic waste of time. Perhaps I am looking at this wrong: if I enjoy jigsaw puzzles, it is a waste of time? Do I need to be productive all of the time? I know life is precious, blah, blah, blah, but maybe I shouldn't be so hard on myself for...relaxing.
That is it. I shouldn't be so hard on myself for relaxing. If jigsaw puzzles are keeping me sane, then why not do them? Maybe I went a little overboard. I can pull back, but I need to be more patient and gentle with myself
Now, I have a new hobby: fire. I am starting to feel like Abraham Lincoln. He spent lots of time by the fire, as did most people who lived before 1925. Maybe I can read by the fire, knock down one of the many stacks of books I have around the apartment.
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