The Moment I Finally Saw It Differently

Image from https://matthewjamestaylor.com/boggle-shaker

I love word games. Games that involve a bit of strategy, a bit of mind-poking, a bit of quiet competition. One of my favourites growing up was Boggle, played round the family table with the kind of seriousness usually reserved for exams.

The hourglass would flip, and our hands would go. Furious scribbling, every word we could spot from the angle we were sitting at, pencils gripped a little too tightly because nobody wanted to waste a single second. We kept score. We were, all of us, quietly competitive about a game with plastic letter cubes.

And then, without fail, there would come a moment where everyone hit the same wall. A brain freeze. We would stare at the same sixteen letters, willing another word to appear, and nothing would come. It felt, for a moment, like the board had simply run dry.

Then someone would reach over and turn it. Just rotate it a quarter turn, so we were seeing the same letters from a different side of the table.

And there it was. A few more words, sitting right where they'd always been, just waiting to be seen from another angle.

The tiles hadn't changed. Only the angle had.

I think about that a lot now, off the game board. How often do we sit stuck in front of something, certain we've wrung every possibility out of it, when really we've only ever looked at it from one seat? The job that feels like it has nothing left to teach us. The relationship that feels flat. The Friday that feels, on paper, entirely unremarkable. We call it dry. We call it "just how things are." Sometimes it isn't dry at all. Sometimes it's just waiting for someone, even ourselves, to turn it a little.

This isn't about forcing a silver lining onto a hard week, or telling yourself things are fine when they aren't. It's smaller and quieter than that. It's the discipline of asking, before deciding something has nothing left to give: have I actually looked at this from another angle, or have I just been sitting in the same seat?

Some weeks, you turn the board and nothing new appears. That's allowed too. But more often than we expect, what we needed was already there. Not a new set of letters. Just a different way of sitting with the ones we already had.

That, to me, is what a gratitude Friday is for. Not manufacturing something to be thankful for. Just turning the board, and noticing what was there all along.