My rather stern Scottish Grandmother ran a tight ship of a home, but my Danish Grandfather provided a few places to color outside of the lines. There were two places at their home that I found shelter – the sand box where I could build worlds of my own design and secondly my grandfather’s version of the Man’s Den, where he kept his pipes and a rich stockpile of jigsaw puzzles.

There must be some inhered gene for solving puzzles, because I still love the feeling of placing all 500 pieces, face-up on the table and sorting the edge pieces from the inner shapes, all the while fitting together little bundles of the picture.  Of course, occasionally there is the bonus of a few pieces that are still connected from the factory. Or maybe my cousin simply didn’t put the game away properly.

I don’t limit this “putting the picture together” endeavor to simply children’s games though.  Apparently, I apply it to everything that I do, including coaching others as to how to put their very own life’s puzzle together. Perhaps, other brilliant scientists and economists and anthropologists take this same approach when trying to create models of physics and economics and human cultural behavior.  But I had to go and choose a field that is mysterious by definition and then take a lifetime trying to make sense of how the heck to live life itself.

Some days I think, “By golly, I’ve got it.”  But of course, the next moment proves that ideas are always in need of a tweak. Yet, slowly, I believe that I am finally getting close to having the outline of the edge pieces complete. And guess what? The pieces are transparent and constantly in motion.