Piecing it together: Jigsaws can reward a second look.

Americans are fond of noting (perhaps too often) that, if the only tool you possess is a hammer, then every problem tends to resemble a nail. What, though, do problems look like if your sole tool is a jigsaw puzzle?

I have pondered that question while struggling vainly and interminably with a present from Paris' Musee d'Orsay. The woman I love, evidently resolved on torture, brought home a jigsaw puzzle with no right-angle corners, containing hundreds of tiny pieces in bizarrely convoluted shapes, including a fair number sawn into miniature statues, torches or blank squares of wood. If your only tool is a puzzle as weird and tough as that, then every problem needs to be treated as a puzzle in itself, then a sequence of interlocking puzzles, all to be finally puzzled out. I still await that happy ending.

Books of management advice draw on all manner of nutty sources, ones as eclectic as Zen Buddhism, cricket, yoga or dog training. Management counsel based on jigsaw puzzles would be eminently more practical and pointed.

Jigsaw puzzles teach how to focus on one object alone, to the exclusion of all the world beyond. I have been known to disappear down the jigsaw hole for half an hour scrabbling and scrounging around in search of a single piece, refusing to put on the air conditioning as an incentive to make rapid progress.

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Jigsaws reward a second look or a second thought, especially for those prepared to look and think again after doing something else, allowing time to elapse, and only then coming back to the table. Solving crossword clues works in the same way. The puzzles oblige us to explore all possible permutations, turning our minds as well as the pieces this way and that to fit colours and shapes harmoniously together. They force us to be logical, because improvisation, even allied to common sense, just will not solve the problem.

Finally, but critically, jigsaw puzzles offer us a rare opportunity to deal with a problem from beginning to end, and actually just for once to bring a task to a successful conclusion. Putting in the final piece is, obviously enough, the simplest of all, but simplicity and satisfaction can be synonymous. If many problems cannot be fixed, most puzzles can still be solved.

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First Word: Jigsaws an exquisite torture for Mark Thomas