Putting a puzzle together is an exercise in overcoming a daunting task through relaxation, acceptance and focus.

Colors, shapes and patterns all blur together on the table as an impossible mess. How can you possibly make heads or tails of that brown splotch? You may shift the pieces around, attempt to apply some kind of logic, try a few random combinations and probably fail dozens of times over. Then, suddenly pieces start to jump out at you. That is clearly a deer’s rump. Not the one on the right, the one in the background on the left. That little white thing? That’s the tail in the air. You don’t make the logic, you cannot force the puzzle to come together. You have to quiet the chatter in your head and let the colors and shapes reveal themselves to you.

It’s almost unconscious. You’ll catch yourself saying, Oh that’s what that is! The piece didn’t change. The piece has always been that piece. It is the same shape and color that fell out of the box minutes, hours or days before. The only thing that has changed is that your brain has been whirring silently in the background processing visual input until it makes connections.

Because that is what our brains do; it makes connections.

There is a certain amount of trust that goes into solving a puzzle. You have to trust that these are all the right pieces from the right puzzle. You have to trust that the puzzle maker cut the pieces deliberately so that only one combination of pieces is correct. You have to believe that this problem is solvable and trust that you will be able to tell if you’ve put a piece in upside down or sideways and have the wisdom to correct your mistake.

I was working on a puzzle when I heard the news that ICE had killed a woman in Minneapolis a few miles from my sister’s house- a few miles from where I was sitting in the sunny spot in my sister’s dining room. Since then there has been an avalanche of noise and feelings, good information, bad information, lies, and panic. Justice cannot come fast enough, especially when you anticipate it will never come at all.

I scroll through my feed to see how my friends are doing instead of calling them. Everyone is busy with impotent rage posting. It’s easy to see they aren’t ok. They are certain we’re broken in a way that we’ve never been broken before- we are all colors and shapes that don’t make sense scattered across a table.

My son and I have a text conversation. For hours he wrote out all the arguments and shook his digital fists at the heavens that nothing matters anymore. People can kill you, slaughter your family, blow up your neighborhoods, shoot up your school, make you disappear without a trace and the law doesn’t hold anymore. So why bother? All bets are off. It’s the PURGE.

He’s young. He hasn’t lived through trouble before. Truth be told, this kind of trouble is new to me, too. Well, not entirely new. I’ve felt this at low doses. I’ve run afoul of bullies in a land where might makes right and people will betray their moral spines to keep their softer parts safe from their best frenemies. It’s a place where you hang out with people you don’t even like because it’s better than the crushing feeling of loneliness that falls from the wide open sky. That land is a little farther from my sister’s house than Minneapolis, but not that much farther.

I come across an article about the murder on a news site based in Albany, NY. I read it and go straight to the comments:

A picture of Yoda surrounded by the words, Fuck around and found out, she did.

A GIF of Cartman from South Park with the words, Respect my authority!

She’d be alive if she had complied!

In a moment of weakness, I post a comment myself. Remind me not to move to Albany.

I watch in real time as a reply pops up, Good. We have too many dumb fucking liberals here already.

I smile and reply directly, Why are you so mean? Then I respond to my son because he had stopped texting for a while.

This is totally a fucked up time. I wish I could help you feel better about it, but I will admit to feeling uneasy myself. However, we are not the first or last humans to live through social and political upheaval. We all have some big decisions to make about how we want to use our lives to meet this moment. I’ve told you before that I believe the world needs you. It needs your heart and your passion, your sense of fairness. Hold onto that and don’t let the douchebags convince you to give up your morality, your sense of self to in order to fight back. Otherwise you are fighting just because you’re angry not because you have anything of value to defend. If you have nothing of value to defend, you’ve already lost.

I return to the puzzle on the table. It is overflowing with bright colors and tiny details. I find a light shadow that stretches across three pieces and, before I know it, a whole corner comes together. Unlocking the shadow suddenly made all of the little spots and color variations come into focus. Oh! That’s what that is!

Some day this will all be just another story of a life and it will all make sense- as if it was all bound to end up this way. It’s funny how inevitable a picture seems once it exists in its entirety, but until then it can be almost anything.

I pick up my phone and text my son again.

This doesn’t mean you are not allowed to be angry. You can be angry and still be true to yourself. My Gen X soul recommends you spend at least 5 minutes a day yelling “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me!” and then go out into the world holding tight to both your soul and your conviction.

For Renee Macklin Good, Becca Good, their children, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile George Floyd, Victor Perez, and the many, many, many people murdered, injured, and families devastated by fools wielding power they are not fit to possess.

May we grow to see more clearly the picture we are creating.