Trusting a Messy Process When You Can't See the Picture: One Piece at a Time

7 days ago

3 min read

Pink collage with cutout dancers, butterflies and puzzle pieces on wood; text reads The messy Middle (piece by piece).

Have you ever built a puzzle without a picture?

I recently came across a puzzle that had no picture guide, and I was determined to see if all the pieces were there. I started the puzzle like any other, by dumping out the pieces on the table to see what we were working with.

One by one, I turned the pieces over to uncover the tiny piece of the picture shown.

My initial thought, this is so annoying.

Scattered broken patterned tile pieces spread across a wooden floor, in blue, tan and brown tones.

Then, the first piece fit. Which was strung together by more pieces coming together and a plethora of little dopamine hits as confidence was built in the process. My husband was in his own world making sense of completely different pieces, colors and patterns. Our girls would come help us by taking credit for entire sections or pushing the pieces together in a way that made all the rest no longer fit together.

Although messy and slightly annoying, they also were some great help in providing insight into the process.

A messy process makes it hard to see the bigger picture

What I found interesting, is each of us became fixated on a portion of the puzzle that made it hard to see the bigger picture, literally. The way my mind began crafting the pictures and the way it was all supposed to fit together changed with every new discovery. At one point we rotated the smaller pictures to see if we could see the puzzle in a new way. My husband and I were 90% positive for a whole hour that there was no way this picture could even have straight edges. We just assumed it was some weird shape.

One piece at a time, the puzzle came together and made more sense as we connected the smaller pictures into one. It was fascinating to see how the picture changed on the table and even more so how my brain was making sense of the situation in real time and adjusting to make everything work and make sense.

Trust that we will get there

I have found that I connect almost everything now to the business I am growing or to help my own clients make sense of their world. Sometimes the organized space or idea is so far beyond our imagination we don’t know what it’s going to look like in the end.

While we can dream, this is also partially the point.

We have to trust that we will get there and put the pieces of the project together one at a time.

The unknowns along the way can be debilitating and uncomfortable and when we zoom out and see things from a different perspective, it somehow comes together again. Even more so when we allow others to come help us in their own unique and messy way.

When the puzzle was done, there were four straight edges and not a missing piece in sight. Even if I thought we were building three different puzzles at one point.

It was a messy process and even though I’m glad we had succeeded, I missed the thrill of the adventure in getting there. The adventure was the point all along wasn’t it? Problem solving and skill building to get to the solution of a beautifully put together puzzle.