The Collective Puzzle

Every day we are placing Puzzle pieces whether we pay attention or not. The difference is easily seen in retrospect - ‘did you have a good day? has the week been filled with the things you love? has the last year been one you’re happy with?’ As we learn to bring presence & self-reflection to our days the pieces we add to our Puzzle each day become more vibrant. We’re able to visualize our lived mosaic of our skills, habits, and experiences.

Every connection is an interface between Puzzles - that airport encounter with someone you met once at a conference, now perfectly positioned to solve a current challenge. Small world? More like completely interlaced worlds. Each interaction leaves a piece of your puzzle with them and theirs with yours. Physics has a term - constructive interference - for what happens when two waves align and the amplitude multiplies. Human collaboration does the same.

Shared visions build dreams, send people to the moon, and interconnect all of us further even if we weren’t part of the vision. If we zoom out just a bit we may start to see that not only are we directly connected to every Puzzle we’ve ever interacted with, but it doesn’t take many layers of connections to be connected to everyone on the planet. And that’s just identifiable human connection breadcrumbs.

We’re learning nature is so much more incredibly interconnected. Mycorrhizal ‘wood-wide webs’ let trees trade carbon for minerals through threads of fungus. Saplings in the shade borrow sugar from the giants shading them; dying trees empty their stores into the roots of the next generation. Inside us, trillions of gut microbes crack open fibers we can’t digest, spinning them into vitamins and mood-altering chemicals we can. Nature’s Puzzle pieces cross species lines, cross dimensions, and create a collective Puzzle that we forget how much a part of we are.

Our connections, to our circle, to the world, to the universe, aren’t just conscious trades of utility, they’re the operating system of life itself. Everything you are has been since the dawn of the universe. To envision ourselves isolated in any way is purely a recent human mind software bug.

I think it’s important to remember this as I hold the vision of my future Puzzle and work to create and place pieces daily. I am a part of The Collective Puzzle. There are no edges to my Puzzle or The Collective Puzzle. It has more dimensions than I can imagine and extends in ways I can’t intellectually follow. I try to feel it, if anything. I try to acknowledge there’s more out there than the limits of my perception allow me to experience. I consult my intuition, which I try to describe to myself as the combination of subconscious thought & signals received from unknown sources. I don’t just walk through my Puzzle, I flow. And I am just a wave in the ocean, a chance vibration in the energy of the universe. The Collective Puzzle has no individual pieces - we are all the same.