I have a bit of an addiction to Search & Find word puzzles. I started loving it at age 10 & then somehow never really invested on buying the books until I was doing A levels at age 16. Since then I've gone through countless books; word by word, page by page. I sometimes save the time I finish each one, together with the date & my signature. Nowadays, I just save the date since there's no need for my signature anymore... It's become such a ritual in my life & I'm so accustomed to my own style of solving it, that if someone decides to do 1 or 2 words from a puzzle, I would know... There's no hiding it from me! hehe
I knew I was getting too good @ it when I started finishing entire puzzles in less than 2 minutes. As soon as I cross out one, the other word becomes visible to me... there was no pause. It's like I'm in a sort of trace...
I have a preference though... I prefer puzzles that are square with the letters evenly distributed & not different spaces between rows & columns. When they're even, I just have to blur my vision & I can see all the words jumping out at me. Also, I always do them in order, from word 1 until I reach the end... I don't jump around. It takes a certain level of self ctrl to see a word & not circle it only because its further down the list.
Anyways... while doing one of the puzzles today, I just couldn't find the word 'frog'. I searched searched searched & just could not find! I reverted back to my childhood technique of going line by line, top to bottom, bottom to top... & I still couldn't find it. And then I got a revelation about life! hahaha I can think of life as a S&F puzzle... Looking @ it in the beginning, everything looks jumbled, mixed up, no order or understanding... & yet we're given a list of words to find, a list of things to fulfill, in the order of which life means it to be. Sometimes finding what we're looking for is easy... & sometimes, no matter how much we search, we just can't find it! So we think 'Maybe it's not there'... but it's there alright! Amongst all the apparent confusion & randomness, it's there right out before our eyes, yet we can't see it. So we skip it over... move on to something else in life, ignore the feat we couldn't accomplish thinking its a lost cause... When we reach the end of the list & we've ticked off 'school' 'marriage' 'job' 'child' 'icecream' 'hurt' 'pain' 'loss' etc we may think to ourselves ... 'there is just no happiness' :( But if we look closer... its there.... its meshed into & in between; the 'h' in hurt... the 'p' in pain ... the 's' in loss... It's there... but sometimes it's part of something we never thought it could be... it was there all along. We just have to find it!
