Why I Start Each Day With Sudoku
A love letter to my morning routine.
Every morning, the first task I give my struggling-from-sleep brain is to solve a Sudoku. My body may have stumbled through some simple things like waking the children, mumbling good morning to my husband, and pouring coffee. But my brain isn’t capable yet of truly reading the news or replying to an email. I settle at the kitchen table with my sharpened pencil, adjust my reading glasses, and gaze at a grid of numbers and spaces.
I have been solving Sudoku puzzles daily for years now, though when I tried to teach my son how to do it, I found myself bereft of language. The truth is, I don’t really know how I solve them. I have strategies, sure. “What do we know about 4’s?” my family will hear me mumble, or “This can’t be a 7, this can’t be a 2, so…” But my eyes scan for patterns without my conscious brain being fully engaged. I find myself filling in numbers without being able to articulate the logic behind my decisions. It’s a little bit like magic.
Directly above where I sit with my coffee is the desk where, later, I will try to write. I will coax and cajole the words to do my bidding, I will wrestle with unwieldy shapes, trying to approximate the vision in my mind. But it is an asymptotic process; I will only ever get close to the essence of what I am trying to express. Even…
