If the World Were a Puzzle

If the World Were a Puzzle

If the world were a puzzle, you could take a piece from here and put it over there. If it didn’t fit, you could just put it somewhere else. Wouldn’t that be a hoot? Well, that isn’t so far fetched either because over the last number of million years, that’s what the world has been doing to itself. Only, it didn’t take people into account. They just wandered from here to there and got swallowed up by the effects.

It didn’t strike me until the other day when I was given a world globe. It was something I had always wanted. This one though was a bit different. It was basically a blank, black globe and the world landscape was made up of a great number of puzzle pieces held in place magnetically. Properly constructed, the pieces would all fit together to form a world atlas. The problem was that a number of the pieces were identical shapes, so you might have a piece of ocean in the middle of a continent, or a piece of a country in another country.

How I came by this was quite interesting. The globe had been given to a geography teacher as a retirement gift. He had studiously put it together. When he passed on, his widow had moved and the globe must have fallen and a number of the pieces had come off. Someone had tried to put it together again with very limited success.

 I received it along with an envelope full of pieces, and began to put them in place. Something was not right. I suddenly discovered that Antarctica was up north. Then I noticed that some of the longitudinal and parallel lines didn’t match up. I guess someone was trying to fix the thing and didn’t succeed. Either that or they had an imagination similar to mine and were playing jokes.

Then it occurred to me; a long time ago God must have got a big package of countries and oceans and things in the mail with instructions to ‘make something’. Well, you can imagine the fun he had with that! How he managed to create the whole world in seven days is beyond me. It will take me that long just to figure it all out – never mind put it together!

Looking the whole thing over, I suddenly felt omnipotent. I had a chance to build the whole world as I saw fit. I could hardly contain myself. An urge came over me to put on a blue serge suit so I would look the part. Thus dressed, I tried all the commandments I’d read in the bible. I waited, but nothing happened. It seems there is a little more to this creation business than comes in the kit. So I changed back into my ordinary clothes and went to work at it. The demolition was easy enough and roughly parallels what we humans are doing to the planet, but the reconstruction is a bit trickier. Well, we know that already, don’t we?

There is a good lesson to be learned in this exercise. At least that’s the way it seems from up here on the top shelf.

Just sayin’.