Waxing philosophical about taking photos of puzzles

Does anyone else take a picture of their puzzle when it’s done? I usually do this just after completing it. I began this rite of passage shortly after I became a hobby puzzler, but I never had a reason why. So, I thought about it. What is the purpose of this ritual?

For starters, taking a photo of anything serves to commemorate the event, to memorialize that moment and all the things associated with it – like, “Wow, that one was complex and took forever,” or “We built that one at Christmas time, and we sipped mulled cider and talked all night while we puzzled.”

Taking a picture of a puzzle also creates a trophy of sorts, to show your accomplishment and recognize a job well done – or at least done, because all completed puzzles look the same no matter the method, though one could argue there could be superlative skill involved, say if it were assembled it in record time, in the dark, in the back of a car, with one hand, etc.

An image of a puzzle can also serve as a record. If you trade puzzles, you can show that all the pieces are there; or if you forget if you’ve made a puzzle before, you can check the pics on your phone to verify.

The most philosophical reason to capture the image of the finished puzzle is to mark its moment in time, just before it becomes nothing again. This reminds me of a wonderful episode of Madame Secretary in which Buddhist monks created a magnificent sand mandala, comprised of precise formations of colored sand. Immediately afterward, the monks dismantled it. The executive assistant Blake was confused and felt sad that ultimately the monks would turn the work of art into an indiscriminate pile of sand. This, chief of staff Nadine explained, is the point. The beauty and order of the mandala were transitory.  The intent is to ponder this impermanence and juxtapose this idea with everything in life and life itself.

I sometimes feel that sadness too, as I crumble the puzzle into its box. One could say that I have wasted my time building something just to take it apart afterward. But each puzzle comes with the experience of making it, with a friend or alone. And each time the puzzle once again becomes a pile of pieces, it is an opportunity to build something new, or build it again – faster and easier, because of my past experience.