The Puzzle Origin Story cont...

What am I supposed to do with this info?

First read The Puzzle Origin Story.

cont…

The vision was an almost complete framework. There were parts of the vision that I didn’t understand. Sometimes it was myself and sometimes other people moving through their puzzle, kinda like walking through a tunnel. So much was going on. The vision was exploding in my head it was all I could do to try and write down what I was seeing. Central to the concept is that the pieces get laid down in front of us whether we intentionally place them or not. Time becomes a forcing function.

Weird things would happen as the puzzle evolved and grew, in the vision. Pieces would fall away, some pieces were red, almost in flames. Some pieces glowed with a white light. To me these were all signals about that area of their life - some pieces fit perfectly and they were in-tune with their puzzle. Some were forced or didn’t belong at all.

After much back and forth I thought I had a fairly complete visual, even if I didn’t understand it all. I asked the vision if that was it, if we were done. I wish there was a way to definitively prove what happened next. Looking at the screen of my phone, the keyboard disappeared. I thought…that’s strange….as soon as that set in, the words disappeared and it was just a white screen. I started to form the thought that we must be done when the phone died. Ok then. We were done. I shit you not.

I got out of the pool, went inside and went to bed. Woke up with a weird feeling, pretty confused. “what do I do now? why did this happen? what am I supposed to do with this information? who do I even tell about this? It’s pretty out there.” While these questions festered in the back of my mind I went back to work and life. More info would come to me about the puzzle at random times. Sometimes in response to something that happened in my life, sometimes random. Sometimes I would even have dreams that felt like it was meant as extra information for the puzzle. Some made sense and tied parts of it together, some didn’t make any sense at all. But I wrote all the things down.

I started thinking about the content of my puzzle and my life. How my choices were affecting the puzzle, how I was moving through it and where pieces were coming from. And how my puzzle is connected to other puzzles. See, another central theme of the vision was that our puzzles are connected to each other when we interact. Pieces fit together. Anytime we interact with others in a meaningful way our puzzles seemed to grow larger and more complex. The sheer act of cooperating with others had a positive effect on both puzzles. Helping others with their puzzles, now that seemed to be the key to everything.

So I kept referencing the puzzle in my life and I soon realized that, for me, the puzzle wasn’t just an analogy…it wasn’t just a tool I was using…it started to become the lens through which I looked at life. The puzzle became the glue that was holding the different parts of my life together. It showed me more clearly the connection between the different parts, how they flowed together as I moved through time, the only constant.

The feeling that I wanted to share all of this grew inside of me. But what a weird thing to share. I feel vulnerable and really uncertain why, yet here I am. As the pictures became more complete and the tools to use this framework worked for me, I decided to start trying to string them together into coherent concepts. The experience, to be fair, reads back to me as fiction, some kind of fantasy. So if it sounds like that to you I hope you’ll still read along and subscribe just to hear the story. If you’re wondering ‘why,’ I definitely think you should read along. I want to share in more detail the various concepts within the puzzle. There is some work inside the puzzle. Taking our contemporary US cultural desire for all the things and harmonizing it with stillness, presence, and reflection is not an easy task.