Everywhere I go

A new experience, a tried and true method, and puzzles left unfinished. Also a little Aracelis Girmay, as a treat.

Yesterday I did something for the very first time.

Which is always exciting, isn't it, realizing as it's happening that what's happening is wholly novel—a brand new-to-you experience!—and sensing as you're in it how you're moving through it, what you're feeling and thinking and how as it's happening it's made maybe a dozen or a million other things not happen, each path taken is one forsaken etc etc, how your whole life—which is entirely and only this exact moment, really, isn’t it—is now inexorably and infinitesimally changed because you, like a tree, are a catalog of everything that's ever happened to you and now your treebody life forever from this moment on includes this new thing that is happening for the very first time, this instant, my goodness. It’s almost enough to welcome change.

The thing that happened is I abandoned a puzzle.

I made a graph about it.

the ideal puzzle experience (IPE) is not unlike a rigorous yet rewarding hike

this particular puzzle experience was not ideal

The puzzle was awful and I had a horrible time. Each piece placed was a hard-won triumph, only it didn't feel triumphant at all. It was tedious. I found no joy in it.

So I abandoned it.

I've disliked puzzles before. But no matter how sadistic, I've always finished my puzzle as a matter of pride or principle, probably the former.

I am a person who loves puzzles and tries to finish what I start.
I am a person who wants to believe I am the person I tell myself I am.

I am also a person who, despite all of this, made for the first time yesterday a decision I hope to make more easily for the rest of my life:

I stopped doing something I didn't like doing.
It was hard at first and then very easy.

I wonder if I'll ever go one day again without having to learn my little lessons. Probably not.

Anyway here's my puzzle method which, like all people who prefer a particular method for anything, I believe to be the best.

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how to do a puzzle (best method)

1. touch every piece of the puzzle

2. find your edges

3. sort remaining pieces as needed in this order:
   - dominant color
   - pattern + texture
   - shape
   - peculiarity

this was not the puzzle in question. this was the puzzle i did when my grandfather died. grief is weird.

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Anyway, I hope your heart is warm and beating and alive in there. Have a poem before you go.

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Ars Poetica
by Aracelis Girmay 

May the poems be
the little snail's trail.

Everywhere I go,
every inch: quiet record

of the foot's silver prayer.
              I lived once.
              Thank you.
              It was here.