Every morning, if I have the time, I like to do a Sudoku puzzle – and no matter what the difficulty level, I happily fill in the numbers until successful completion. I prefer to do the game online because it enables me to add and remove mistakes, etc, without cluttering and messing up the page, as in the newspaper versions.

For those of you who are not familiar with Sudoku – it is a Japanese number game designed to test and develop logical thinking. It is made up of 9 blank boxes, each of which has 9 blank squares within it. Depending on the difficulty level, certain squares will be filled in already for you. Each of the 9 boxes then must be filled in with the remaining digits – 1 to 9 – one only of each digit. The across and the down rows will also follow the same rule – one digit per row. And that’s it!

However, I have struggled for some time with the “hard’ and “very hard” categories, until I realised that the devil is in the detail. Each blank square in each box can have a number of values determined by the numbers already in the box or rows up and down, and the remaining numbers needed to complete them. So, it is vital to fill in the blank squares with the correct possibilities carefully and accurately – if not, you will throw the sequence off course and be unable to complete the game.

This morning, as I completed today’s “hard” category puzzle, I realised that here in front of me was a metaphor for life. I was learning something beyond a simple game of Sudoku – I was learning the most important lesson that life could teach me.

How clever are the Japanese Masters of Sudoku!

I realised that until the blank squares are filled in accurately with all their possibilities, patterns cannot emerge and create patterns that will necessarily emerge to enable me to begin the process of elimination and completion. So, until my foundations are all in place, solidly and precisely, nothing can happen.

And isn’t that just like life? If I am going to learn something new, or attempt a project that I am uncertain about, then I cannot hope to make it work without learning the first baby steps, otherwise whatever I am building will inevitably fall down and be useless to both myself and others.

For some of you reading this – all you Earth types out there (Taurus, Virgo, and Capricorn) – this will be self evident.  Not necessarily so for the rest of us – Water signs like me (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces) may try to intuit and feel their way around the problem; Fire types (Aries, Leo, Sagittarius) won’t sit still long enough – in fact, they’ll already be off designing the next best thing; and Air signs (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius) will like the idea for the while it holds their interest.

However, isn’t it always the way that once we ‘see’ something, it immediately becomes apparent and we wonder why we never understood it before – and then we see it everywhere? As the wise person said “If I hadn’t believed it; I wouldn’t have seen it.”

So, today’s  Daily Sudoku is my personal “Aha” moment – revealing to me this morning, that until the foundations are well in place, the project will fall apart and never be completed successfully. And I can tell you right now; this is a most powerful realisation for me personally to experience. In fact, the word ‘realise’ also suggests “to make something real”.

Although I have been doing Sudoku for a few years, it was today that I ‘got’ the metaphor. This brings me to wonder how many other simple tasks that we do routinely, are redolent with metaphor or meaning that passes us by. And the metaphor is only meaningful if it opens up a possibility or insight within that can change how we view or understand life differently. This is the key, I think.

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If you wish to try the Sudoku puzzle for yourself, just visit “dailysudoku.co.uk” and scroll down the archives to pick out the easiest puzzles for your first attempt. The rules are clearly explained – and away you go – enjoy!!

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