I’ve been working on a jigsaw puzzle, a good thing to do on a cold, late winter’s evening. It’s only a 300-piece puzzle, one that my children did, but all the pieces are so very busy that a few minutes into it I felt as if the puzzle would humiliate me, that I’d be unable to do it. I think of social media posts I’ve seen of people sharing completed 1000-piece puzzles. I could do this one, I told myself.

After the edges were in place, I got in the groove as I was filling in a hot air balloon in the top right corner. Find your way by spotting the patterns, I told myself, one pattern at a time. The bright zigzag stripes of color of the balloon. The dark blue of the waves. The cords of the sailing glider. The red streamers the children are holding. Look at the chaos of the pieces on the table but set your eyes to see. To see the patterns. To see even the hints of patterns.

Look long enough and you realize there is more to see. I used to be a cytogenetic technologist, analyzing chromosomes, a mass of black and white and gray bands on each of 46 paired chromosomes, with each pair different and sometimes differences within pairs. How is it possible, I thought at the start of that training. But you look and look and look and look, and practice, practice, practice, practice, and eventually you see each of the hundreds of bands and know exactly where they should be and when something is not as it should be. You just know.

I’ve learned this lesson so many times in the past, but it’s something I seem to need to keep learning. To trust that keeping my eyes open will eventually lead to sight. I’ve also learned that sometimes I need help seeing something right in front of me. A second pair of eyes might see the spiral in one corner of the chaos that connects to the piece I had overlooked. Just this week I read a line of prayer, something I’d read—even recited—a hundred million times, and saw it in a whole new way thanks to what someone else wrote about it.

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[Photo: A space station Playmobil set that my children played with when they were little, now being enjoyed by my grandson.]