When my daughter started kindergarten many years ago, she’d walk into the room and head straight for the puzzle table. While other kids would scoop up a ball from the basket and rush through the double doors to the back yard, she was strictly a jigsaw person.

I don’t remember teaching her how to attack a jigsaw, she just knew. She’d start with hunting out the four corner pieces, move on to the edges, and then concentrate on building the picture, filling out blocks of colour or pattern. She worked methodically through the stack of puzzles one by one and, when she’d finish doing them, then she’d go outside and play.

I’d never been a jigsaw puzzle person until I had children but the delight I witnessed in my daughter meant I started buying them from garage sales whenever I had the chance.

Second-hand jigsaws are obviously a risky purchase because they often have pieces missing but mostly we’d muddle through the boxes and, once we’d finish them, I’d return them to an op shop with the lids taped shut, so somebody else could experience the joy. One year a friend even used a photograph of my daughter to have a 500-piece puzzle made of her face as a Christmas present and we lay on the floor on our stomachs until we finished it.

When my kids hit their teenage years, they outgrew the sparkly unicorn and dragon puzzles, so I gave most of them away to friends with younger children. We didn’t really have the space for undertaking a larger puzzle, because our dining table was too small, so we stopped puzzling, and nobody seemed to miss it. Instead, my daughter introduced the household to card games they played at school, and soon we were playing ruthless rounds of Cheat, Blackjack and Poker after dinner each night. Sometimes we’d surrender a Sunday afternoon to a long and brutal game of Monopoly or Catan but mostly we were all about the speed of a game of cards.

When my dad died unexpectedly last year, I found it hard to relax.

My brain would loop and race through thoughts and worries, and I struggled to write or to finish projects. We spent months cleaning out his house and divvying up his furniture and I inherited the long dining table we’d eaten from as kids which could house an impressive feast, and also fit the slow construction of a large jigsaw puzzle.

One afternoon I was emptying out my cupboards and found a 1,000-piece jigsaw that my daughter had bought me one Christmas that I hadn’t even unwrapped. It was a puzzle of a lush garden and a stream, and I knew just by looking at the picture on the box that it would be difficult because there were so many patches of similar colours. It was the perceived difficulty of it that made me sit down at Dad’s dining table and open the box. Just like my daughter had done, I started with the four corners, moved on to the edges, and then began filling in small patches of colour. That first morning, I only stopped to change the record I was listening to, and to refill my cup of tea.

Hours drifted, and the puzzle started taking shape.

For the next week or so, I’d begin each day in my pyjamas, sitting at the table and puzzling. Sometimes I’d work for an hour or so and then return over lunch and do a little more. The cat was so frustrated by my lack of attention that she’d bound up on to the table and plonk right in the middle of the section of jigsaw I was focused on. If I tried to move her, she’d miaow at me, so I mostly left her where she was and moved on to another section.

Soon I realised that it was the first time in months that I’d felt in my body. Instead of overthinking everything, all I cared about was searching through the box for the right-shaped piece to fill a gap in the picture. I didn’t even mind what the picture was. I just needed to find the right spot for each piece. The simplicity of doing something that existed only to complete was like a meditation. And when I finished that puzzle and smoothed my hands across the 1,000 pieces that linked up to create the picture, I felt calmer than I had for months.

Minutes after I finished, I pulled the puzzle apart, boxed up the pieces, sealed the box and went to the op shop to buy another. I’m just hoping this one doesn’t have any pieces missing.

• Nova Weetman is an award-winning author of books for children and young adults