Crosswords are awesome

My favourite Christmas present I received cost just £4.60. It was the latest Puzzler – a bumper crop of mostly word-based quizzes that you pick up at the checkout, in your local supermarket.

(Yup, I’m officially old now.)

This is only my second ever copy – we’ve been working our way through the first, very slowly indeed, for the past year! But my wife noticed I’d completed most of it (aside from the weird stuff), and thought it would be a nice touch to get me another, as a surprise.

💘

I’m fascinated by crosswords.

Not the cryptic ones—those can get in the sea—but your bog standard, here’s-two-ways-of-saying-the-same-thing type crosswords.

Some clues come easy. Some are impossible (words, or terms I’ve never heard of) and then there are those in the middle.

You know the ones, where you think you should know, but there and then, you can’t figure it out. They might feel like they’re on the tip of your tongue, or, conversely, you might have no idea.

In tackling these, for a while, I’ll ‘wrack my brain’ (left brain; intellect) until actual steam comes out of my ears. There may be frustration, occasional swearing, and stopping to check in on it repeatedly during the day, as I pass the kitchen table, where the book resides.

But there’ll come a point where I have to give up. Just accept that I don’t know and move on.

Now, because this is a little trifling thing, it’s really easy to completely forget about it. It never enters my consciousness again. The book’s closed, or buried under the sort of cruft that accumulates on kitchen tables, and sometimes I even forget there’s a Puzzler there at all.

Until I remember, or spot it, or am idly waiting for coffee to come to the boil and looking for a way to wake up, first thing.

I’ll pick it up, open it up to the page of the crossword I was working on, look down and already know the answer to the problem I was struggling with.

It’s B O N K E R S.

😵

I guess in these situations we’re farming it out to the right brain (subconscious; life), in that way that Richard Carlson always referred to as ‘putting it on the back burner’.

The answer we’re seeking is already within us, but its time hasn’t come.

There’s literally nothing we can ‘do’ in order to speed up the process… we just set the intention, and life does the rest.

With crosswords, this process is quick and easy and fun to observe, but it’s no different from any other problem we’re struggling with.

It’s just that those look to be more important, so we feel more compelled to ‘wrack our brains’ for a solution we’ll never find with the intellect.

So, whatever ‘difficult situation’ you find that mind of yours stopping to check in on repeatedly during the day, convinced that it will reach a solution, if only you think a bit harder… why not accept that you don’t know and move on.

Not only do you get to stop wearing yourself out with your own thinking, but you’ll also create the space for the answer to come to you, too.

And if these Daily Reminders are little pointers for you (and me!) to see the universal principles at play in your experience of life, then the humble crossword is surely one of the easiest ways to remind yourself to ‘think less and live more’.

💟

Giles