‘Tis the season

It began with this easy 500-piece Nova Scotia scene, part of a nifty boxed series of Canadian scenes. From there we progressed to a painting of an unwilling King John, pressed by scowling knights into signing the Magna Carta, thus enshrining the rule of law.

After another one of the Parliamentary Library and the Peace Tower in Ottawa, I moved on from politics and government to cheese, taking on a challenging puzzle of three cheese men of Holland, pushing and pulling their sledges loaded with cheese.

While talking to an old friend on the phone, I continued trying to fill in numerous cheeses, which all look much the same. She being a fellow puzzler, we discussed why it is that we love doing this so much. “It’s the brain,” she told me. “Our brains just can’t resist those intermittent rewards.” To that I must add the relentless pattern seeking behaviour of the human mind and the delighted satisfaction upon finding it. Most important of all, though, is the chance to put the thinking process into neutral gear, letting it rest and idle while the eyes seek out the pattern and the fingers put the pieces in place, one by one.

Another interesting aspect of puzzling is how it sharpens your ability to notice subtle details. The picture below contains numerous cheeses, and until one really looks, they all look the same. Yet the differences in shape, size and shading of each cheese, the colours of the sky, the subtly variant tones and damp spots on the crooked paving stones are the very features that make the challenge of assembly possible.