I enjoy puzzles of all kinds, from Sudoku to crosswords to old-fashioned jigsaw puzzles.

What I appreciate most about them is the way they illuminate the unfathomable complexities of the mind.

Specifically, they show me how much is happening in my brain without my conscious awareness.

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I don’t know where they learn it, but even lots of little kids are totally fixated on “easy” and “hard.”

They divide the world neatly into this organizational scheme, defined as follows: If can do it easily, it’s easy; if I can’t do it easily, it’s hard.

These kids are missing a lot of context, to say the least. They tend to relish what is easy, even as they treat it with a bit of scorn. Meanwhile, they resist what is hard, assuming that it will be out of reach.

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My brother-in-law’s spirited young dog had been fascinated by the yarn in my lap. Despite the dye, perhaps he could smell something of the sheep, or maybe he just liked the way it moved when I knit. He kept trying to eat it, and we had a couple of close calls.

At one point, we lost track of him. It turned out he had opened the plastic bin in the other room where I keep my yarn and was now tearing around the house with the yarn in his mouth, victorious at last. Hilariously, he had grabbed the same color I was using.

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The dining room table was strewn with tiny cardboard circles, little wooden figurines, and stacks of laminated cards.

These were familiar elements of Euro-style board games by now, but now we were playing a brand new game. Examining the pieces — like fifteen different kinds of pieces — I couldn’t make sense of any of it. I tried to be patient as my husband read the rules, but I found myself getting sleepy and struggling to concentrate. The words passed through me without meaning. As he turned the pages, I didn’t feel as though I was getting any closer to knowing how to play this game.

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It takes a few weeks for some students to get used to working online.

Ernie, who hates to ask for help, claimed to have worked six hours one day in his first week online, when the evidence showed clearly that he poked his head up at 2 PM, dabbled in some schoolwork, and then went back underground 30 minutes later. When he showed up on Zoom calls, he was listless.

These kinds of avoidant behaviors are normal at first, even when life isn’t in complete upheaval. If we have always been monitored closely, we have to figure out how to get work done when no one’s looking. We have to gather our own motivation. And once we’ve done this, instead of waiting for help to arrive, we might be determined to find a way through a problem ourselves.

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