The Parable of the Wordsearch

Everyday, the first grader entered the classroom on the brink of crying frustrated tears.  He knew what grave peril awaited him on the worn desk in the broad, eastern facing room.  The sun’s jubilant rays could not lift his spirits, and with anticipatory defeat, he sat down heavily, clutching his dull pencil grimly.  He stared at the large block of letters in front of him and knew that this morning, like every other morning, he would not be able to finish.

Yes, this was the daily wordsearch.  Ten words were hidden among what seemed like a vast sea of letters, and they were impossible to find.  In two months of school, Chris had never found all of the words in the 30 minutes allowed to complete the exercise, and this devastated him. When he woke up in the morning, he knew it was coming and nothing could shake the bleakness of his mood. While his fellow first graders would walk in with light hearted ease, and do their morning work with good natured chatter, Chris could only stare at his paper somberly.  It wasn’t that Chris couldn’t read. His skill in that area was above-average, and his spelling was decent. The problem, Chris came to feel, was that the word puzzle was intensely stupid and bad and mean. He could not understand why he had to submit to it daily.

One day, in early November, the sun’s rays illuminating his little corner seat, Chris’s teacher approached him. She whispered a few words in his ear. What she said caused him to gasp, and he picked up his pencil in a rush. In the end of 30 minutes, he had completed his first wordsearch.  As the weeks wore on, he no longer moped to school, and he became one of the best wordsearchers in the first grade.

As an adult, Chris sometimes remembered his teacher’s words when frustration paralyzed him and indecision blighted him.  She had said:

“There is no order.”

She had meant that while the words one had to find were listed in a particular sequence in the wordbank, one could locate the words in the actual puzzle in any order one saw fit.  He had spent months agonizingly trying to find each word, one by one where he could have scanned the puzzle for any of the words, circling them as they caught his eye.

He learned that even in the most rigid of situations, he always had agency. In this way became one of the life’s best wordsearchers.