When people ask me about my job as a crossword columnist, it invariably leads to the confession that, until a few years ago, I didn’t think I could solve a crossword puzzle. Their interest turns to bemusement: “But why? You love wordplay!” I still don’t have a good answer to this question, and I can’t remember what my logic was at the time. Solving a crossword puzzle just seemed impossible to me until I tried it, and the exercise didn’t seem to exist within the Venn diagram of my interests in word and play. I’m sure that many of you have faced this kind of incredulity — the puzzled expressions that follow an admission of not liking something that, in theory, you would be great at. Maybe you’re a stats major who can’t seem to crack Sudoku. Or a visual learner who doesn’t care for Tiles. You have a love for anagrams, but Spelling Bee doesn’t scratch the itch. An interest gap is as defensible as an aversion to a particular food, considering that we have to eat, or giving up on a TV show that you’re supposed to “give it a season” to get into. (That’s not television, that’s homework.) But should we be so keen to settle into our resistance? Or — as with the surprising success of my own crossword journey — should we muscle through on the assurances of others, because it’s possible we’ll come to love what scared us? It’s possible that, as we age, we become psychologically primed to avoid having to learn anything close to fields we’ve already mastered. Margaret Talbot described it as the fear of “being seen to be bad at” something when you’ve already established that you generally know what you’re doing. Plus, we lack the naïve optimism of our teens and 20s. “Starting all over at something would seem to put you right back into that emotional churn — exhilaration, self-doubt, but without the open-ended possibilities and renewable energy of youth.” We have only so much time, and getting good at things requires a lot of it. Show me a board game that takes longer than five minutes to explain, and I will show you the door. Show me an escape room, and I will not enter it. Life is already one big escape room. By the way, I do think you should try solving the New York Times Crossword. At the very least, you can say you gave it a season. Bonus Puzzle: Wit Twister |
