The comfort of a Rubik’s Cube

Solvable problems to help cope with an unsolvable life

Solving a cube in my studio

Hey y’all,

I’ve been teaching my teenager how to solve a 3x3 Rubik’s Cube, layer by layer. Once we got to the third layer, I realized I solve it pretty much by muscle memory, so I had to refer to my notes:

What surprised me looking up these notes wasn’t the notes themselves, but where they were in my diary. The date: February 1, 2020.

The narrative I’d been telling myself for years was that solving a Rubik’s Cube was one of the hobbies I picked up during the pandemic. But actually, I started learning to solve the cube on the last day of January, a whole month before the pandemic began.

I started flipping back through my diary to try to figure out what else was going on in my life at the time. And then it hit me: my friend Jason Polan died on January 27th, 2020.

So, the real story is this: I got one of my sons a Rubik’s Cube for Christmas in 2019. A month later, I needed a little grief processor, something to solve, something to do with my hands. I picked up the cube. A month after that, the whole world went into grief mode, and the cube became even more handy.

A sign hanging above Foxes Board Game Shop on Salt Spring Island, inspired by something I wrote in 2020

When so many of life’s problems are unsolvable, solvable problems are a wonderful distraction. When so many things seem unfixable, fixing something feels amazing.

Years ago, we bought a big box of new doorknobs for our old house. Once I had my technique down, I could replace a doorknob in a couple minutes, but every door was slightly different, warped with time, so there was enough thinking involved to keep each replacement interesting. I found the process enormously satisfying. So satisfying, in fact, that I didn’t replace all the doorknobs at once. I saved a handful of doorknobs for times when I was feeling really stressed out.

Solving the Rubik’s Cube was a little bit like fixing doorknobs. I missed the whole craze in the 80s, so I was completely new to it. After watching an online tutorial, I discovered that there are step-by-step systems you can apply to solving it. You can actually attack it like a programmer with code: You basically look at the cube and run if/then statements in your head to find the right algorithm to apply. After the first dozen solves, I felt like I was replacing doorknobs again, except there were as many doorknobs as I wanted!

We’re wired to want to turn chaos into order. Randomness into meaning.

There’s something about keeping your hands busy when your brain feels broken. I have friends with depression who build elaborate LEGO sets. I’ve read about veterans with PTSD who put together gigantic jigsaw puzzles.

After I learned to solve the cube, I started seeing how fast I could solve it. I was partially inspired by the 40-minute Netflix documentary, The Speed Cubers, which I just re-watched with the kids. But I quickly grew tired of speed as a measurement. (For fun, the teenager timed me when we were sitting around yesterday, and I solved the cube in something like a minute and a half. The world record is around 3 seconds.)

Once I gave up on speed, I had a big “Now What?” moment. The fun, of course, was the challenge of learning to solve the cube. Once I figured it out, it wasn’t so fun or engaging anymore.

I see in my experience with the cube a little half-baked metaphor for creative work, which I attempted to explain to Tim Bogatz and Pixel Labs when they were filming me in my studio for The Art of Education conference. I posted a shorter clip online, but here’s the whole outtake, uncut: