From Between the Sheets
Most mornings I wake up slowly with cafe au lait and online puzzles while nestled between the sheets. I love Squaredle, a fairly sophisticated word-search puzzle requiring a healthy vocabulary and morphological proficiency. It not only tests my word knowledge, but builds it. The game is not based on speed, but accuracy improves my score. So I take time to research words as I go and, consequently, learn a lot about word origins and subtle differences between similar terms.
I play other games—Wordle, Phrazle, Connections—none of which emphasizes a race to finish. That’s important to the quality of my dawning day. I want to take my time. But when I seek new puzzles, it seems these “timeless” games are giving way to the “beat the clock” variety. I can’t handle those. When I know there’s a timer ticking—it interferes with my calculations and slows me down.
Herein lies a metaphor for life as we now know it. A mindset reinforced by the proliferation of texts, chats, and pop-up ads constantly competing for our attention and compelling us to do more in less time. Our brains are continually trained to race and juggle, but I’m not so sure our gray matter is adequately adapting.
And it begs the question: What is everybody sprinting toward? I’m in my eighth decade and can forthrightly tell you there is no glorious thing at the end of the race. No ribbon or medal. No sudden “aha.” No pot of gold—unless, of course, you were racing to accumulate wealth. But even if your end-of-the-rainbow makes you richer than Elon Musk, you’ll ultimately discover that time, itself, is now hurtling—and yours is almost up.
When my daughter was quite young, her school tested her for “giftedness.” The immediate conclusion was that she missed the mark by a few points. Upon discovering the examiner used timed tests, her father and I explained that she panics when fighting the clock. She was retested with instruments that don’t involve a stopwatch—and lo! She qualified for the “gifted program.”
I wonder how many kids out there are not getting the stimulation they need because somebody thinks they don’t do things fast enough.
The tendency to push for speed has been around awhile. When I was in junior high school, some experts came into my classroom to teach us “speed reading.” Apparently just plain reading wasn’t good enough. We were taught to halt our scanning of text just short of the left and right margins. Our peripheral vision would theoretically pick up the information on the edges. I tried it. Repeatedly. Without ever digesting the material.
Maybe that explains kids who can read, but don’t want to. If you merely skim a novel, you probably won’t enjoy it.