I wrote this in October and thought I should post it here…
In a recent plane ride home from Rhode Island, a woman in front of me was explaining how to work Sudoku puzzles. She was a patient teacher and I was soon able to complete my own puzzles. At first, it was very enjoyable. But as I do with almost everything, I turned it into a job, having to prove to myself I was worthy of completing the most difficult puzzles and that I could get them right.
I have now completed every single puzzle available on my Centro and I’m all the way up to the Diabolical puzzles. For every other level, I could easily ascertain the patterns and have most puzzles finished in under 15 minutes. Not so with the Diabolical puzzles. These are tough! I get stuck and can’t figure out how to solve them. I finally succombed to reading Sudoku tips on-line and there are ways you can add the figures to decide which number fits best in whatever square. But I don’t want to have to do that! The other alternative the tips suggest is to guess.
GUESS??? I don’t want to have to guess! Sudoku had me hooked because everything made sense. On all of the levels before Diabolical, no matter how difficult, the patterns quickly became apparent and all the numbers eventually fell perfectly into place. Guessing means you might have to get something wrong before you can get it right. I don’t like things like that. I don’t want to have to get things wrong. But if I do, I usually have a string of back-up plans – just in case.
I think it was Edison who said that he hadn’t failed, he’d just figured out 10,000 ways that didn’t work. I can assure you I’m not Edison. I get something wrong and I immediately think of myself as an idiot and failure. Which is probably why I’ve never invented anything. But I guess that’s the way puzzles work, sometimes. You have to keep trying different pieces until you find that one that fits.
Do you suppose our lives are like that? Like puzzles? Are there pieces that fit and that don’t fit? I think that is what I was probably taught – that there is a completed picture at some distant place and time and if I mind my p’s and q’s and don’t mess up, I’ll put everything together in the right way and will be rewarded with that completed picture. Everything will make sense.
I’m beginning to realize, however, that life just doesn’t work like this. After 20 years of marriage, you can’t go back in time and try someone else and see if it works better. Divorce statistics are higher for each subsequent marriage which suggests that chances are good the second marriage will be just as bad as the first, and possibly worse. My second marriage, however, was much better than the first. So maybe the third would be even better? Probably not. I’m perfectly happy in my marriage until I start wondering if there might be a better fit for me out there (the piece that will complete the puzzle).
You can’t take your kids back to the time they were 5 and put them in a different school to see if that makes their lives “better”. There is no way to measure these things. If you made the decision to put your kids in public school, what is the point of wondering if private school would have been better? There is no way to know what the “right” way is. We may decide to take a different route with our younger child. Or our kids may decide they will do things one way or another for their kids, based on their personal experiences. But they can’t know if this will be “better” for their kids, either. It’s simply a choice we make given our experience and available information.
Maybe life isn’t a puzzle? If so, maybe it’s OK to quit searching so frantically for that perfect piece? Maybe we can simply enjoy the process as it unfolds, however imperfect it may be.