People are amazing

People are amazing. You me, them, everybody - we all have an enormous capacity to grow and change and learn and his capacity is much greater than we think. I’ve always believed this but now I know, and this is how.

My husband and I like to do the cryptic crossword at night.  The love of the crossword is something I inherited from my fiercely intelligent mother and foisted onto my husband. We usually do pretty well too, finishing the crossword most nights.

But there is one crossword compiler who is just so fiendish that he leaves us with the majority of the puzzle blank. DA (as he is known in the crossword world) is known for setting clues so cryptic, they are clues within clues, within clues. Never have I been able to solve more than four clues of a DA crossword which appears every Friday in the Sydney Morning Herald. In fact, lately I’ve just stopped trying. I have better things to do on a Friday night anyway. Right?

Monday’s crossword, however is the opposite. Maybe the Sydney Morning Herald has taken pity on us poor workers, but the Monday crossword tends to be a bit easier to solve than others. Until last Monday when my husband and I solved just over half of the clues, but were struggling to get anymore. I went to sleep worrying that our crossword capacity was much diminished and it was with much interest that I checked Tuesday’s paper for the solution.

Except, the solution on Tuesday didn’t match the puzzle on Monday. At first I thought the SMH had made a mistake until I checked the date and on Monday we had accidentally picked up Friday’s untouched crossword.

Without knowing it we had actually completed more than 50% of a DA puzzle. Instead of being a disappointment it was a great triumph.

I believe  we only managed because we didn’t realise it was DA and approached as we would any other puzzle. We didn’t let our brains, our fears and our preconceptions get in the way.

There are two lessons to be learned from this.

1.       What can seem to be a disappointment can actually be a great triumph, depending on the way you look at it

2.       Our fears and preconceptions hold us back unnecessarily and all too often we let them get in the way of our successes