One of the most overlooked entertainment sources: the puzzle. I love puzzles — everything just clicks right into place, cleanly and perfectly to create the bigger picture. All you have to do is find where what goes. It’s a nice contrast to real life, which is messy and things usually don’t fit into place without adjustments or trimming, leaving part of the picture incomplete. And even worse, in real life you have no idea what it’s supposed to look like, so you’re trying to put pieces together without knowing what you’re supposed to put where.
I also like the idea behind the pieces versus the whole. When you look at a piece, you might just see black with some light grey in it, but once it’s in place it makes sense, and moreover, that one piece may not seem like much in the whole picture, but if it weren’t there the image wouldn’t seem right. It would be incomplete, something that irks me unendingly. I doubt I’m the only one.
Beyond the fact that the picture looks nice, and the puzzle has nice metaphorical value, I can think of two other main reasons why I like puzzles so much. The first is that it provides a sense of satisfaction, to have figured it out on your own and to have created something nice by doing so (the same satisfaction applies to LEGOs). The second is that it can be a relatively mindless activity (or at least, doesn’t require total focus), since it’s very much a visual connection or attempting to put the piece in various places. This leaves the mind open for wandering, which, for a writer like myself, is a wondrous thing. This is especially beneficial for me, because, as much as I love contemplating plots and characters and the perfect wording for some sentence or another, I have trouble focusing to do so. It’s the issue I run into when watching YouTube or television or listening to music: I can’t sit still. I want to be doing something with my hands, to feel like I’m doing something productive. The same goes for mental writing exercises: I want to do them, I enjoy doing them, but I have to be doing something with my hands. And puzzles are the perfect candidate for that, because they don’t detract much attention from the story, while giving me something fulfilling to do.
