A person with a tendency to analyze everything has a specific set of skills. Learning to see the puzzle in everything has its costs. They are everywhere, these puzzles and once you start looking at them, it’s impossible to stop. It just so happens that people and all the deceits and delusions that inform everything they do, tend to be the most fascinating puzzles of all. Of course, most people don’t appreciate being seen that way. It is a lonely way to live sometimes. It does have its costs.
At times, the puzzle seem impossible to solve and some in fact, are never solved. Some you must just move away from, give up, mark it down as unsolvable like an ill manufactured rubix cube; one that was accidentally made with no way to solve it, no way to line up all the little colored squares. Then there are others, simple to figure out, beautiful once solved and glorious in their simplicity.
We all wear costumes to hide our puzzles; clothes that on the outside say to the world “This is who I am”, “I am a professional”, “I am a surgeon”, “I am Jewish”, “I work for the electric company”; uniforms that hide who we really are on the inside, and project to the world a strong sense of who we want the world to believe we are. “I make life and death decisions every day”, “I am deeply religious”, “I can fix things” are all ideas of ourselves we want to project to the world. But when the uniform comes off, we are still that puzzle underneath it all; flawed and complicated, soft and hard, a mix of emotion and disengagement, happiness and sadness. We can all be hurt, and we can all do the hurting. It’s how you recover from it that matters; it’s how you solve your own puzzle that counts.
