Choosing your rules
I am a little world made cunningly
Of elements and an angelic sprite,
But black sin hath betray'd to endless night
My world's both parts, and oh both parts must die.
- John Donne
Are we sure about that? (Image from The Diary of a Birthday Doll, Dow, 1908)
My favorite Wordle days are the ones when my first guess yields five gray boxes.
Then I have to come up with another word that uses none of the letters of the first, sending me in a totally different direction than usual. No E’s, no A’s.
Most of the time, this will result in more total guesses before I can find the correct word. But that’s okay! I have six guesses in all, and that’s enough.
I’ve learned that this philosophy is not shared by all of my fellow Wordle players. Many of them believe that, the more guesses it takes, the worse you’ve done. If they take more guesses than the other people in the group chat that day, they lose.
Is it better to guess the Wordle on the first try? We’d need ESP. Two tries is doable, but mostly down to luck. Three tries is common and sometimes the result of skill — but sometimes, luck. Is it a better win than a game that takes five or six tries to find the answer? I don’t think so.
Some of the rules we add to the games we’re playing — whether literal or metaphorical games — raise the stakes in unnecessary ways. Particularly when these rules challenge us to anticipate elements beyond our control, they aren’t helping us.
Some rules can prevent us from enjoying a game well played. Some rules let us tell ourselves lies about our performance that prevent us from getting better.
In tennis, the scoring system means that it’s theoretically possible to win a match and have scored the same or fewer points than your opponent, or even to lose more games and still win. What matters is the distribution of the points within games (and games within sets).
It occurred to me the other night, as I was desperately trying to turn around a losing game in a losing set, that if I was going to lose this set anyway, I might as well tank this game and save my energy for the second set. (I decided to play my hardest anyway, and still lost.) This insight highlighted the conflict that sometimes occurs between what’s required to win and the strategies we get attached to that don’t necessarily make a difference to anyone but us. Are we willing to let those go if it would make us more joyful, more successful, or help us to win?
As I close out the final semester of The Little Middle School, I’m doing a lot of things that aren’t strictly necessary — or, at least, I wouldn’t face personal or professional consequences if I didn’t do them. I’m spending least an hour editing each student’s progress report up to our established standard. I am inviting local artists and other service providers to offer enrichment experiences to our students. I’m mediating interpersonal conflicts between students with as much love and care as I can muster.
I’m doing these things not because I am being paid to do them or because they’re written in my job description. I’m doing them because that is what’s necessary for me to end this project with a sense of pride and peace of mind. Those are the rules of my game. There’s no point in whining or feeling resentful when I’m the one who made the rules.
Of course, I’ve also decided that ten years of The Little Middle School is enough. That rule, however arbitrary, means that I get to win at the end by my own metrics. That’s what’s making it possible for me to play out the game with enthusiasm instead of discouragement.
A game is a story. As the fictional Beth Harmon says in The Queen’s Gambit regarding the chessboard, “It's an entire world of just 64 squares. I feel safe in it. I can control it, I can dominate it. And it's predictable.” Indeed, we can so deeply absorbed in a game that it’s like we’ve entered another world. We’re buying into the story. We don’t have to put another story on top of that story.
We get to choose the games we want to play, the stories we buy into, and the rules we follow. If those rules aren’t yielding the performance we’re hoping for or the results we want, we can choose new ones.
If we’re feeling bad about ourselves, maybe it’s because we’re not following the rules of the game we’ve decided to play. But it could also be that we have added rules that aren’t helping us. We can carefully reconsider these in order to improve the way we feel and give us the motivation to keep trying.
What are the rules you live by? Are there any you’ve discarded? And do you consider a 5 x 6 Wordle grid a win?
