May 11: the power of 5 letters

It is 5am, and I am stuck at Wordle.

Have you tapped into the world of Wordle?

It’s a simple 5-letter word puzzle. Each day, you get ONE word to solve in 6 guesses.

Wordle showed up on my Facebook feed as orange or green squares months ago.

I had no idea what it was, but I kept seeing more and more people’s daily posts of these squares without any explanations. The more people’s posts I saw, the less I wanted to know about it.

I resisted it even more when I found out that it’s a game. As you may recall (if you’ve read some previous posts), I don’t like games!

I was quite comfortable with my wordle ignorance until the subject came up at our family dinner. Our daughter had been wordling (a verb I made up) with another friend for a while.

“Wait – what? You’ve been doing it without telling us?” All of sudden I was jealous of this exchange she had with her friend.

“Yah – it’s fun! You should try it and you can share it with me, too!”

“Wait – what? You can share it with people?” Now all those Facebook posts are making sense.

“I do it the first thing in the morning to help me wake up,” my daughter continued to convince me.

That did it. I immediately went to the website, tried my first wordle, and hit “share” to our family text group. The rest of the family joined in and it’s been our daily connection since then.

We even got my 88 year old mother in law to play and share daily.

Wordle is beyond a simple game of 5-letter words.

It’s become a way to connect, a topic to discuss, a simple vehicle to bond.

To me, it’s a daily reminder to practice patience, to accept failure (because you won’t always win at wordle), to walk away from something and come back to it with different eyes.

It’s for sure a way to get out of perfectionism. 

How powerful can a 5-letter puzzle be?

You will find out when start wordling, especially when you wordle AND share.