Today, when I typed my usual first word into Wordle, all five letters lit up. “Genius” the NYT website shouted at me! My usual starter word was indeed the Wordle word of the day. Wow! Wordle in one! I should feel over the moon about it. But no. Apart from an initial “ooh”, I felt no sense of satisfaction at all. It was all a massive anticlimax. Why did I feel that way?
It got me thinking about goals. If the goal in playing “Wordle” is really to find the day’s word in as few guesses as possible, then finding it at first guess would surely have to be as good as it gets? Yet I get a deep-down feeling of achievement whenever I scrape in the right answer on a really tricky Wordle in four, five or six guesses. I experienced none of that today.
Imagine for a moment that you are part of the English aristocracy, setting off on a fox hunt. You’re brimming with eager anticipation, dressed in your finest, sitting astride a strapping stallion. The hunting horn has just blared out its first “t-loop-t-loo”.
Before you’ve even had time to nudge your mount into so much as a canter, you see the fox standing there right in front of you, glaring you in the eye. “Take me now if you must!” she says. “But you will be breaking the law. Fox hunting has been banned for the past two decades!”
This morning, it felt like the Wordle fox had turned itself in; glared me in the eye; deprived me of the thrill of the chase. The empty feeling I had inside was the absence of the daily “hunt” for the right word. I now know that it is "the challenge of the chase" and not the supposed “goal” that really matters to me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “Life is a journey not the destination”. Life is also a series of challenges. Some we set for ourselves. Others come and whack us in the face. Many of the latter type we would often prefer to do without.
But without its challenges, what would life be? We cannot always succeed but the efforts we make in facing up to those challenges help give life meaning.
Compared to the vastness of the universe, my daily Wordle hunt is insignificant indeed. But it does exercise a few of my dwindling brain cells and that surely is a good thing. For their next dose of exercise those brain cells will just have to wait till tomorrow.
