Schizophrenic Puzzles

Sort through the pieces to find all the edges and put them on one side of the table. Arrange the like colors in little sections. Start putting together the border. Begin the slow semi-monotonous task of searching through the pieces for something that fits. As time progresses you begin to see an outline. A picture starts to form.

Wait, why are there 5 corners? Shouldn’t there only be 4?

Where did the piece in my hand go?

I thought this puzzle was a picture of a mountain, why do the colors keep changing?

Through flickering bursts of lucidity, the puzzle begins to change. The pieces you have been handling begin to fade. You look around and realize the puzzle you have been working on is not a puzzle at all. You aren’t even standing at a table. You look at your tattered clothes and dirty nails confused about where you’ve been all these years and how you ended up here. How could a puzzle that felt so real and permanent hardly exist?

And as fast as this sense of lucidity came it has gone again. You are back to solving your puzzle. Finding the corner pieces, arranging the like colors in little sections, and trying to find that damn last edge piece.

At times life can feel like this. Working towards some important yet meaningless-sisyphean-shifting-goal where for only brief periods you see the “true world” like Neo emerging from his incubation pod. You have mere seconds to take in the reality before being plugged back in, but in those seconds you feel this crippling sense that everything you worked for was not only in vain but was delusional. Embracing the true reality is harder than being mindlessly focused on solving your puzzle. What are we working towards? Do we need to solve a 1000-piece puzzle? Does it really need to be that complicated?