Puzzles are one of those things I’ve learned to
enjoy by aging. When younger I’d always want to be away from them. In video
games I just wanted the fight and action, but the strategies and techniques
they force us to create have become a very enticing factor for me.
One of the things I noticed now when I started
coming back to playing Chess, Sudoku, Rubik’s Cube and other brain-training
games is how much trances affect my efficiency in the task. It’s amazing how
these puzzles or something requiring concentration and attention, and that I
find myself stuck forever.
But then again, I will try again later and I am
seem to achieve this nirvanic concentration, and as I get so immersed and so
easily locked in the task that the same thing that would be such a problem I am
now solving and completing without the struggle I had before. It’s bizarre,
actually, it’s as if I was playing something else, a different level or
something, but no. I somehow really got to get smarter.
This characteristic of Trances of making my
seemingly mundane mind get so powerful under certain circumstances is something
that never fails to amaze me. And I see it more clearly in my main skills like
drawing and writing and playing music. There are simple songs I can’t find the
notes when learning it by ear, and other times I can easily pick a more complex
riff, or then a drawing that sucks, and then when I am in a trance situation it
all just flows.
Although it can be seen as a nice thing to
have, to have my mental power proved to enhance when in a trance, I am quite
worried about the opposite point of view. There is a variation of extremes
there, and I can get really upset about how dumbfound I am when not in the
trance. It’s quite complicated to manage going between these variations.
