Last year, I was asked a question – As a child, what was peculiar to me?
I thought about this at great length as there were a whole list of things but I felt that they were more a product of being born and raised in a time where you didn’t have much option other than to find your own entertainment. In the big list list there were things such as reading, writing, drawing, playing cards, making mud pies, general mischief, and plotting ways to steal tools and magnets from my father’s workshop…
I’ve spent time trying to work out what if any of these would be something peculiar to me… Almost deciding to give up on the exercise then realising the answer had been sitting on my desk all along. This metal puzzle appeared in a Christmas cracker. I wrestled my kids to get my hands on it.
I used to have loads of these as a kid and I never tired of them. I would spend as long as it took to solve the challenge of separating the parts, then I would take great delight in putting them back together and generally twirling them in my hands until no thought was required…
People I know are puzzled by my fascination for these… Most people I know find them frustrating or just plain uninteresting. I find them quite poetic… they look impossible but it’s all down to finding the twist that lets you seemingly defy the laws of physics… I like that the actual unlocking movement is always effortless… about finding the correct position rather than applying force…
Where that shows up in my life is that I’m often able to solve problems by putting a twist on things. I trick my mind into thinking it’s a visualisation exercise rather than a problem… To get from eugh to OMG that’s so easy…
I look at my scrawled handwriting and eugh… Typed up in draft, it shifts to hmmm maybe…
I look at other people’s writing and I see words innovative, elegant and inimitable… clear expressions of the air that they breathe…
Why has this puzzle come up again now? I’ve probably been over thinking things… the answers are most probably on my desk and it’s maybe not about finding a common thread between all my seemingly disparate ideas but a matter of how I give them a gentle twist to link them all together…
The pure and blessed way 
Love the, “it’s maybe not about finding a common thread between all my seemingly disparate ideas but a matter of how I give them a gentle twist to link them all together…”
They’re ALL yours, and your gentle twist embraces their arabesques and alleged non-belong and non-conformance into full frontal arabesques by… the subtle twist of… just so, rather than bully tactics of Reason? Love the reasons basically being unreasonable, and then, POOF, you defy the laws of physics…
Brings to mind something else. Before the pandemic the TP roll might as well be on The Price Is Right. Now? My ear to wall, I slowly turn that roll like I’m a safe cracker. Click. Click. Click.
LOVE love love the safe cracker perspective you have turned on those metal puzzles. Such a wonderfully resonant metaphor-example for the tinning and tailoring of “just-so” when abducing ideas from within in creativity… love that Autocorrect doesn’t like my “abducing” word, would rather me use “abducted.” Similar concept as I draw them out, though abduction feels to infer too much non-consensual bully tactics… where your, “just so, whisper of a motion,” leans right in not to solve a notion… but to resolve. Just resolve. More than fun, I have a predilection for those… as I have to take a Rubic’s Cube apart and put it back together to say I “solved” it. :). It’s not cheating, there’s just no resolution That merits the word process as that merits the word Loki. 🙂
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Rubic’s cubes are a doddle. I can’t walk past a scrambled one without putting it back into order. If you ever see me with a cube in pieces then it’s because I’ve completed it so many times, I’ve worn the thread off of the screws. Though I much approve of the disassemble, reassemble over the peel the stickers off tactic.
I’m sure Loki would agree. Peeled stickers never lie flat again and why leave a trace of your trickery…
Thanks for your thoughts, especially the ‘they’re all yours’ paragraph 😁
As for your TP antics… 🤣
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Perhaps disassembling is the better option, then 🙂
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👍🏻
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