Puzzlers Compete For The World's Calm Focus And Win Big

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There were two soccer-mom teams: one slated to win, and one certain to lose. The teams had mirror-image opinions on which was which. They both knew they were going to win.

Win at what? A puzzle contest, of course. What else would we aging soccer moms decide to do together after all these years as friends, long after our kids have grown and moved on? One of the esteemed members of our group knew of a wacky event a half hour’s drive from our general locale, where you paid a small fee, were given a boxed 500-piece jigsaw puzzle, with which you sprinted to your team’s table to frantically complete and — as was my team’s certain fate — win.

My team lost, and I don’t mean only against our opposing soccer-mom team, but relative to what I saw at the other tables of puzzle competitors throughout this large, gorgeous dining room in a winery near the Shenandoah Mountains. There we were, among beautiful scenery, exquisite architecture, and fine dining, experiencing miserable defeat.

The odd thing was that the competitive author of this puzzle narrative you’re reading right now wasn’t as disappointed with her team’s loss as she would have normally been. Instead, the serene, dreamy experience of puzzling as a group was the clear prize throughout the night.

I loved every minute of it, and I can thank my task-positive neural network for that. My favorite of all neural networks, the TPN is activated for the most part when we engage in goal-directed activity, when we focus on what we’re doing in front of us. You can imagine that trying to figure out where the small puzzle piece with a hint of green, a slip of blue, and a gold line swerving through requires quite a bit of deep focus. The puzzle contest lived nestled within the TPN.

My team had four people: me, our kids’ old soccer coach, a security agent, and an office manager who barely survived an aneurysm four years ago. We each took ownership of sections of the puzzle. The coach oversaw the edge of the puzzle. The agent took leaves and flowers and probably other sections, but by that time, I was so deeply invested in the cacti that I had no idea what anyone else was doing. The office manager was a generalist, but also the support staff for our team. Here, this piece looks like it’s for you!

At first, none of us cursed, but as the night progressed and our minds sank deeper into the task in front of us, we started to discuss curse words in a sort of dreamlike state, accentuated by laughs, but drowsy laughs. We were in a flow state, so while our cursing over the difficulty of the puzzle was genuine, we were also like ballerinas spinning in slow motion under the influence of a fuzzy cocktail of hypnotic focus, sputtering out foul language with a loopy smile on our faces.

You would have enjoyed it.

Above all, the back of my neck was on fire. We all agreed that nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs would be our best friends as soon as we got home. We are not young, but if we were, I bet backs, shoulders, and necks would have been on fire, too. Doing a puzzle for two hours turns your upright human posture into a precious memory.

After an hour or so, my team intuited we might be lagging behind the competition. I was so insistent on getting every puzzle piece with even a hint of cactus into its rightful spot that I didn’t care one bit if we were behind. I was sunk too deep into my focus and the shared dream-state of our team. Our generalist decided to start running reconnaissance missions to the other soccer moms’ table. She’d return with intel.

“They’re a little ahead of us, you guys.”

“Now they’re really ahead of us.”

“They’re almost finished, you guys.”

The agony of defeat started to seep into our hearts, but honestly, not by much. We were still so hooked into the puzzling that those worldly concerns of win or lose bounced right off us. We were too devoted to the mission: finish the puzzle. Get the dang blue flower connected to the purple flower! Join the pink flower to the cactus! Figure out which of the green spotted pieces go where! Argh!

There were far greater concerns than winning.

Since the waitress kept rotating through the tables, letting everyone know it was last call, then thirty minutes until the end of the contest, then fifteen, we couldn’t have been more dedicated to the cause. As time shrank, the stakes skyrocketed. Our hearts and every possible inch of our minds were invested. We had to finish.

We didn’t.

Our rival soccer mom team did finish, though they didn’t win the overall competition. Still, they felt the sweet pulse of victory, I’m sure. I can’t speak for my team, but it was painful to clean up the pieces on our table and put them back in the box — painful not because we lost, but because we never got to see our goal realized.

But didn’t we?

If you ask me, the night was a huge victory. I went into the night ambivalent. I groaned as I got ready to leave my house earlier that evening because I was extremely tired from a period of bad sleep. My husband said, “You don’t have to go. It’s your birthday. You can do whatever you want.”

This was true, I could. But I’d already committed that I’d show up, so I went for it. As soon as I got there, I was awed by the beauty of the property. I’m usually so stuck in my day-to-day that I rarely get closer to the mountains that are within sight of where I live. The venue set the stage for a special experience. Slowly, the idea of winning was downgraded in favor of other things: mountain scenery, friends, laughter, woozy cursing, and above all, the flow state of putting together a rather difficult puzzle.

Puzzlers at the other tables also remarked on the difficulty of the puzzle. You might not be able to tell from the photo, but it was tricky. This invited our TPNs to engage more rather than less. It was an opportunity to let go of the peripheral worries of the world, focus on the small, and enter an engaged calm state. The world has ever more stories to tell us each day about how scary and sad it is out there. Sometimes we need puzzles.

Only one team won the contest that night, but all of them won the big prize of spending time with friends while hooking into the inconsequential smallness of a flower-filled brainteaser. That’s a big win. I’m ready for the next contest.

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Have a lovely rest of your week, my friends.