Wordle. An addictive word-guessing game that has you coming back for more. I started playing a few months ago. First for fun. Then for meaning. And for anyone who knows me, they know my first love has, and always will be, words and the power they hold.

Soon I discovered I was not alone. Old friends from my grade school days have gotten in on the fun, posting their daily “masked” results on Facebook. But once I found that my eighty-one-year-old mother played too, that’s when things took a turn.

Every day we text each other our “masked” results (you get six chances to guess the right five-letter word) and we saw that on most days we had the same amount of turns, but never the same guessed words up to the result.

“Let’s make a story out of it,” she suggested. Piquing my storytelling interest, I said: “Game on.“ And so every morning we share what we experienced: first the results, then, when both had played, the actual words we used. And out of that we create a pithy line. And inevitably we both laugh with great silliness.

It is joy in six guesses or fewer.

On most days, it took us three tries to get it right. But the interesting thing was no longer that we had to keep up that statistic, but rather which words we chose.

It represented our mood, our need, our desire. And the more desire we had, the worst off we were. Because desire, I found, does not help you reach the goal set out before you. What does, however, is a deep listening. A quiet mind. Calm. A consideration of what is before you. In that power-of-slow state of mind, I would guess in the most miraculous sleight of hand. It was as if I were guided by a higher power, what we both call The Matrix. We practiced dipping our hands into the matrix. And it showed me how to move beyond desire to what is truly there.

Our egos are important for keeping us safe. But, more importantly, there is a world beyond that, waiting for us to come and play.