A couple of squirrels are twitching at the base of my bird feeder. One has just attempted to thwart the long cylindrical baffle by shimmying himself up into it. It didn’t work.
I suspect that’s why he’s consulting his bushy-tailed buddy.
“How can we beat this thing?” he wants to know. And within a few minutes, I know he’ll be back – maybe trying the shimmy again. Maybe trying another giant leap from the Japanese maple onto the feeder itself.
Squirrels are problem-solvers. They can’t stop. And eventually, by process of elimination, they always win.
That’s what I hoped for myself as I watched from the couch and went back – again – to my paperback Sudoku: 100 Wordless Crossword Puzzles book. I admit it. As I filled in the grid lines and squares with numbers 1 through 9 pretty easily, I was starting to feel addicted to the process. And proud, especially since the book carried an introduction by – gasp – New York Times Crossword Editor Will Shortz, a man whose crosswords always elude me Sundays on NPR.
I had grabbed it, long unattended on my bedroom bookshelf, after taking a Young Brain quiz in an Aging Mastery course.
I had done pretty well on the test but fell a few points shy of the top tier when I noticed that I could get there if I would just “engage in puzzles, Sudoku and other brain-challenging activities” daily or even a few times a week instead of once in a while.
It would also help if I could “stretch my limbs and joints” 3-4 times a week instead of confessing that “the only thing I stretch is the truth.”
Always competitive and a tad compulsive, I vowed to start the year with these new habits. Thanks to a book I was reading for a lawyer wellness group (I’m also addicted to groups), I decided not to make these goals but instead to become “a person who regularly does puzzles” and “a person who regularly stretches (my body).” That way, I’d be building Atomic Habits, a sure-fire self-improvement mode.
Unfortunately, in my zeal to improve myself, I shared these efforts with my older son, an Amazon junkie, who immediately supplemented the Will Shortz challenge with still another book, 1,000+ Sudoku Puzzles, Easy to Hard. The mastermind behind this one founded a website call Funster.com, which specializes in even more brain exercises – enough to provide easy gifts for every major holiday for the rest of my days. My son grabs an opportunity when he sees it.
Maybe I should be flattered that he chose the advanced version, rather than the “large print easy version” with plenty of “room to work.” Maybe. Except that a friend looking it over noticed immediately that without room in the margins to pencil possible answers, I would have trouble “ghosting” the 330 difficult ones.
Until that moment, I had only heard about ghosting in the context of online dating, where it is a very bad sign. Turns out it’s also a bad sign in Sudoku, where the puzzle is so hard you have to test-drive answers, or use techniques called “RC Counting”, “Tagging”, and “Line Checking”. And apparently it can get worse with the so-called “Miracle Puzzle,” which invokes special chess rules and dictates that “any two orthogonally adjacent cells cannot contain consecutive digits.”
Orthogonally? This no longer sounds funster.
Still, I’m vowing in 2022 to puzzle on – in spite of warnings that Sudoku addiction can be hazardous to your health. Too frustrating, say its detractors. Too addictive. Too anxiety-producing. Prone to leave players with a “sense of desperate incompletion” – the same, I suppose, as “too many books, so little time.”
An antidote to all this misery seems to be taking a break, getting up and stretching, for example.
Which leads me back to those squirrels in the front window. I thought they were trying to solve a puzzle, but no. They were just taking a stretching break, leaping from the maple tree to the feeders.
I guess there’s a lot to learn from squirrels.
Copyright 2022 Pat Snyder
