You know you’re a puzzler when…

Some people call it an “aha moment.” It’s that flip-of-the-switch elucidation or realization when something has happened or changed.  It can be subtle and only have meaning to you, but it is still a milestone. I remember singer Gloria Estefan saying in an interview that she experienced her “aha” moment – when it occurred to her she had made it in the music business when she heard her first hit single turned into an easy listening Muzak instrumental.

Far lower on the scale of accomplishment yet still something worth noting, I recall the moment I realized I had become a true puzzler. It was that moment when I used “puzzle” as a verb.

In my full-time job, a marketer once told our CEO that we would know that our company was on the unicorn path when our customers started to use our company brand name as a verb. Like, “Let’s Uber,” or “Photoshop it.”

Keeping these anecdotes in mind, I realized I crossed the puzzler threshold when my person and I understood each other when I said to him, “Do you wanna puzzle tonight?” Neither of us thought that this meant that I was asking him if he wanted a puzzle. Of course, by virtue of him understanding my meaning, this indicates that my person also crossed the puzzle-verb bridge too.

What does all this mean? Not much, but it’s a good conversation starter, for you and another puzzler, i.e., “When was your moment?” Answer: “When I realized I would rather build a puzzle than eat,” or “When my Christmas wish list was all puzzles,” or “When I made a room in my house just for puzzling,” or, “I dreamed I was puzzling.”  Or it could be, “When I used ‘puzzling’ to mean ‘putting together a jigsaw puzzle’ and not ‘confusing.’”