life lessons from working jigsaw puzzles

15 07, 2022

More Lessons from Jigsaw Puzzles

By |2022-07-12T10:54:19-05:00July 15th, 2022|Friday on the Miller Farm, Miller Farm Friday|0 Comments

A Blog by Chicken Wrangler Sara


One way I “water” my soul in the summer is by working jigsaw puzzles. We used to spend a couple of weeks in Colorado each summer and I would do a puzzle a day.

I miss those days – especially the cooler weather.

I even blogged about the lessons I learned while doing jigsaw puzzles.

  1. Consider results carefully before making a decision.
  2. Sometimes the only way to know if something works is to try it.
  3. Keep trying until you find what works.
  4. When things aren’t going right, it may mean backing up to see where things went wrong to begin with. Then make it right and move ahead.

A piano student recently gave me a couple of jigsaw puzzles, and I dedicated an entire weekend to complete one of them. It was a chicken puzzle of 1000 pieces and was quite a challenge as I am out of practice.

As I was working, I thought of some different things to learn about life from jigsaw puzzles.

  • Sometimes you have to focus on one section at a time. The whole picture is overwhelming but each chicken is more doable. So is one day at a time.
  • It helps to walk away and come back with a fresh perspective. (That works a lot better than dumping the whole thing over in frustration.)
  • Life doesn’t have to be perfect. If you look closely, you will see that there are two pieces missing. At one point I would have considered the puzzle worthless and thrown it away. Now I can look at the whole picture and see the beautiful chickens without getting hijacked by the missing pieces.

Perhaps these insights come from two years of earth-shattering events. What might be considered catastrophes have taught me some valuable lessons. It just took sitting still at a jigsaw puzzle to see them.

17 07, 2015

Lessons from a Jigsaw Puzzle

By |2015-07-09T10:29:49-05:00July 17th, 2015|Miller Farm Friday|1 Comment

A blog by Guest Blogger Chicken Wrangler Sara

My husband and I visit my parents in Colorado every summer. He goes to fly fish and I go to work jigsaw puzzles. I realize they have jigsaw puzzles in Texas but my obsession with them prevents me from setting one up in my home. I would not be able to do anything until the puzzle was complete.

At my parent’s house, I can spend hours sitting at the jigsaw table and no one minds. People even stop by to help. So far this trip I have done 6 puzzles. Five of them were 550 piece puzzles and completed in a matter of hours. The last puzzle had many fewer pieces but was much harder.

water fallI gave the puzzle made from a picture of North Creek Falls that I took last year to my mom as a present, and she’d been unable to complete it. That challenge was all I needed.

As I worked on this puzzle, I learned many things.

  1. If I had thought about it, I would have realized there were not enough different colors in this picture to make it a practical puzzle. Every piece was gray, black, green or white. When separated, they all looked about the same color.

Lesson: Consider the results carefully before you make a decision.

  1. Since all the pieces looked alike, the only way to know if they fit together correctly was to try them. That meant methodically picking up every piece and putting it in a spot and sorting out the “no” pieces. It was very tedious work.

Lesson: Sometimes the only way to know if something works is to try it.

  1. There were times when the last piece we tried was the one that fit. Persistence was crucial. Giving up would have been easy but we wouldn’t have finished the puzzle.

Lesson: Keep trying until you find what works.

  1. Sometimes the pieces looked like they fit together. Later we discovered something was not right when every piece we tried was a “no” piece. The right piece was in the wrong place. We had to take the wrong piece out and find the right place.

Lesson: When things aren’t going right, it may mean backing up to see where things went wrong to begin with. Then make it right and move ahead.

For me, working jigsaw puzzles is therapeutic. Part of my mind can wander while part is fixated on finding the right piece for the right spot. While my mind is wandering, sometimes it stumbles upon some important life lessons.

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