My theme for 2025 = Magic

We have a long-standing tradition in my neighborhood of writing This I Believe essays annually and reading them aloud on New Year’s Day. I love knowing my neighbors (and myself) through this lens. Here’s the essay that I wrote in December 2024.

I’m a latecomer to the nerdy game of Wordle (which, btw, I really think should have a 5-letter name, who cares that it’s a pun on the puzzle creator’s name – fidelity to the crux of the game carries a higher weight – this quibble of mine is a foreshadow of my entire premise for this year’s This I Believe, which, spoiler alert, I’ll sum up for you now – I believe I should be able to change the rules of the game midstream, simply discard what we’ve all agreed upon, toss it aside, in favor of something better, and that something better being everyone else adopting my world view).

For those – like me – who have lived under a rock for the past several years, Wordle is a game that surged in popularity during the pandemic and then got purchased by the NYTimes, which expanded its reach even further. It’s a straightforward premise: players have 6 guesses available to identify the chosen 5-letter word of the day, but here’s the twist: there’s no clue about what the word will be, so players have to take a wild (or a strategic) guess. Once an opening word is entered in the app, Wordle displays letters in a particular color, thereby revealing whether a specific letter in the guessed word is in the correct answer for the day and whether that letter is in the correct position or not.

I got hooked because my oldest kid and their partner play the game, and it’s a fun way for me to stay connected to both of them and to - on very rare occasions - create the illusion that I’m smarter than them.

There’s apparently strategy to the game, which I only discovered after more than a month of playing it. The NYTimes bot lords over all players with instant access to all 5-letter words in the English language and will assess each of your guesses and compare those guesses to its godlike intelligence as well as to all other players from that day, complete with graphs and scores.

One day, as I was lying in bed, diving into my first guess for the Wordle of the day, Dave looked over at my screen and offered the strategy of choosing a second guess that had none of the letters that the puzzle had revealed were actually in the word. “You’ll eliminate more letters that way,” he told me. “It’s the way Dusk plays – we think alike, Dusk and I,” he said. Wanting to be part of the cool kids crowd, I played along. Mistake. It did NOT help me on that particular puzzle, actually lowering my stats rather than giving me an advantage. Dave and I have since decided that our marriage is happier when I work on the Wordle entirely on my own.

My only strategy in playing the game was to depend on my robust vocabulary and knowledge of word patterns, two things that I rather sadly learned aren’t very impressive when measured up against a bot. Afterall, I invested (well, pretty much my mother invested) thousands of dollars in my English undergraduate degree. So for a while, I became obsessed. Everything I read from a news article to a billboard, prompted me to catalog 5-letter words. I sincerely have a note on my Notes app on my phone devoted to a list of 5-letter words, utterly random – just words I like or words that have unusual patterns to them. It’s become quite cumbersome, but I can’t bring myself to subcategorize it in any way. I’ve sure thought about it (words with 3 vowels, for example).  There’s a line into compulsivity that I decided I would not cross (just as I have never turned to Google or ChatGPT to help me with Wordle puzzles – I do have some shreds of my dignity left).

That giant list making on my Notes app amused me for a while, but after the election, I started to dream (which is a glorious 5-letter word, don’t you think?) about the people behind Wordle sneakily infusing words into the zeitgeist. Grief felt like a fitting word for the day after the election. Or tears would capture a collective mood. But then, maybe they could introduce the word trust. How about truth? Peace - that was good, too. Anything with a slightly positive, hopeful glow to it. Grace, share, favor, angel, porch, smile, raise. Heart, party, sweet, lover, fancy, adore, honey, happy. Oh, and tryst, roses, ideal. Maybe Wordle could be the tidal change that brought us to unity (yet another 5-letter word).

Setting aside my flailing and grasping for patterns around letters and words and some twisted fantasy that perhaps conspiracy theories might actually HELP heal the world, I had to leave behind the strategy of Wordle, embrace the nerdy fun in it, return it to its rightful spot of being a place to have fun with my kids (side note that touched me so deeply – on my birthday, Dusk sent me a screenshot of their Wordle guesses for that day: first guess – mommy, second guess – birth – we’ll pause here for a collective sigh of affection).

After my convoluted flirtation with word patterns, I turned my attention to something else that I only recognized when it was spotlighted by the Wordle bot’s metrics: luck. Well, maybe I should call it magic so that it can be represented by a 5-letter word and stay on theme (hah! another 5-letter word) for this essay (okay, I’ll stop pointing out the 5-letter words in every sentence, but only if you concede how very clever I can be). Pragmatist that I am, magic and luck and woo and mysticism live firmly outside the circle that I’ve defined as worthy of my attention and energy. And yet…there’s something there.

I wrote this essay over the course of several days, and when I got to this point, unsure about what to write next, I let it marinate overnight. Friends, some serious woo woo shit happened to me. As strange as it sounds, this is exactly what happened: a word floated into my awareness in the early morning, well, really that part of the night I call stumbling-to-the-bathroom-without truly-waking-up, and I knew it was for Wordle. When I woke up, I used that word as my first guess on Wordle. I had 4 of the letters, two in the correct position. I managed to guess the word on the second try. “Magnificent!” the Wordle bot lauded me. “Exactly,” I said out loud to the bot. Whoa. I really need to emphasize here, particularly for people who have never played Wordle – the opening guess is usually a word that hedges bets – words with several vowels, for example or words that use S or R – some of the most common consonants. My first guess? Plait – P-L-A-I-T. Which, then, after integrating the feedback from the color of the letters in the word, led to the correct response on the second try: patio. Whoa! This was big.

I immediately texted my kids my results because no one else would truly appreciate this feat. “I’ll probably never have a better Wordle day ever. I beat the bot,” I texted along with the image that proved my - at least on this day - superior intelligence to most of the world – at least to the bot.

After the glow of being massively impressed with myself began to wane, I admit to entertaining the thought, “Why didn’t I use this magic for something with more impact?!” Which was a very fair point.

I guess I’m going to retract my claim about the premise of this year’s This I Believe. Apparently, it’s about my belief in magic. That Wordle magic isn’t wasted, people, it’s just a taster spoon. I’m not going to go all “manifestation” and start quoting from the book that was famous o’ so many years ago (The Secret), but there are some energetic waves that I’d like to stake a claim to. I’ve had other encounters with something bigger than luck, some tapping of an energy flow that I’ve witnessed in others and that I’ve felt myself.

And as an addendum to the Wordle magic, one day right after Christmas, Lain solved Wordle in two guesses, a feat that I immediately had to investigate. “What?! How did you get it in 2?!!!” I texted, sending along my player board for the day. The word that day was grain, but I had gone through drain, brain, and train before in the 6th and final slot solving it successfully.

“Well, at least you got it eventually!” Lain texted. “My first guess was ‘bagel’ because of brunch today, then I think I had grain on the mind – haha.” Tell me people, is that luck? Magic? I think the answer is clear.

I don’t know how to channel that energy (clearly since I used it on a random day’s Wordle guess). In fact, I don’t think it’s supposed to be focused on me or any one person. I don’t want to dive into research and take my fascination to an intellectual level. And to reassure you, I don’t think there’s a divine plan or the mythical equivalent of the Wizard of Oz pulling levers, but I believe there’s something beyond our human communication capacity. I want to bow to this magic, this luck, this woo – this plane of energy that I don’t really have language for. And I want to hold my healthy dose of skepticism alongside my belief in magic. I guess I just want to invite you all to stay tuned. Also stay alert in your own life. Maybe we can compare notes in the future. I’d certainly like that.