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Hashiwokakeroor:why do we care? |
| Do you like riddles? I do. Be it cross-words, be it sudokus: I cannot resist, I have to give it a try. Sometimes it happens to me that I fail. Just 15 min ago, I ran into troubles deep with the ‘hashiwokakero’ of the ‘Presse am Sonntag’. I was almost done with it. Almost. But finally I had to admit that I had failed. I was incapable of inserting the final connecting lines without breaking the rules. |
| It would have been easy to draw the lines anyway, but it was clear to me: it would have been wrong. So I didn’t. I instead searched for the rubber on the chair beside my sofa and cleared the whole riddle: back to square one. |
| Upon my 2nd attempt, undergone with more care than the 1st one, I finally was successful. Now, no rule is broken, and the completed riddle is before my eyes, perfect, with all rules met. Why – I wonder – does it feel good to me? Why didn’t I cheat upon my 1st try? Why did I keep an eye so carefully on my result? |
| Why didn’t I simply ‘overlook’ the tiny incompatibilities, that prevented me from coming to a perfect ending? And why did it almost feel good to clear the whole riddle and to start again? In principle, I was all alone. Nobody was witnessing my failure. |
| It seems to me that at a certain stage of our development, we do not need a witness anymore to keep us ‘well behaved’. For half a life-time, we experience to be trained and exercised by witnesses of various sorts, be it our parents, our teachers or our peers. |
| For the other half, we continue to nourish this legacy without further inputs. At some point, we feel satisfied by the mere fact of ‘having done it right’, and we do no longer need anybody to tell us that we have done it right. The things themselves they ‘tell us’, our accomplishments bow to us because it is up to us – and only to us – to recognize their being in accordance with the rules. |
| At a certain stage, we begin to love the rules instead of fearing them – or should I say: in addition to fearing them, since we keep on obeying to them? |
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9/16 < MLB (2/17) > 4/17 |