Mind work

I am just about the least ‘on trend’ person you can imagine, but I have caught the Wordle wave and am enjoying the daily spelling ride it offers. I have come to start my day with this five-letter word game that involves some luck and also a good amount of mind-engaging deducing. I play it on my laptop, but enjoy noodling out the options with old-fashioned pencil and paper. 

My results are not going to bring an invitation from Mensa, that’s for sure, but I’m not in it for anything so grand. I simply like chipping away at those five blank spaces until I land on the correct arrangement of vowels and consonants and — like a TV game show — the spaces flip over, all green now, to reveal — ta da — today’s word.

And then, of course, I post my result to Facebook, because part (most?) of the Wordle wave is about sharing one’s solo effort into the larger community. Not for spoiler effect as regards the day’s word, but for the fun of seeing who took how many tries to get that word. It’s pretty harmless entertainment during these trying times, and I am all for harmless fun.

That might be why I gravitate towards fiction for much of my reading pleasure — it’s harmless and it’s entertaining and, when the writing is really good, it is satisfying, too. Words put together on a page to tell a story, with style and skill, are endlessly enjoyable. The best examples I can go back to for hours of re-reading pleasure. But is fiction more than just an enjoyable way to pass the time? Can it be edifying as well?

Apparently, yes, it can.

According to a fairly recent article in the Harvard Business Review, reading fiction develops our emotional intelligence (aka EQ), including our empathy, theory of mind, and critical thinking — three things employers are looking for in their employees and, I would argue, three things that any person who walks this earth should want to cultivate. In a nutshell, the article argues that good literature “presents characters with competing and often equally valid viewpoints” — that would be the point of the story — requiring the reader to contemplate the complex options unfolding on the page. This is unlike many business books, the article points out, which often boil issues and scenarios down to simple binary options: this or that; good or bad. Life is rarely so simple, of course.

So, reading fiction is a way to explore the complexity of the human condition and to exercise one’s mind contemplating how one might, oneself, act in the situations the author has created on the page. Much is written about the equivalent, though different, value of word games for the mind — that they exercise our memory and sharpen our mental acuity. But apparently, that’s all bunk — or at least, there seem to be as many articles out there lauding word puzzles as there are those saying they do no such thing. 

Never mind. I shall continue to play Wordle and I shall definitely continue to read fiction: The first for the fun of the daily challenge; the second for the joy of the stories. In both activities, my mind is engaged as it navigates the world of words, taking me out of myself for a period of time. And who can't benefit from that? Especially these days.

———
Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.