FLASHCARDS! The Riddle of Love

Gabrielle Birchak/ December 19, 2025/ Uncategorized

It’s Flash­cards Fri­days, and today I’m going to talk about some­thing qui­et­ly uni­ver­sal about what humans do when the year begins to slow down. Across cul­tures, across cen­turies, when the days grow short­er and the nights stretch long, peo­ple gath­er. They sit clos­er togeth­er. They talk more. They tell sto­ries. And again and again, they pose ques­tions that do not have obvi­ous answers.

Before I begin, I want to talk about last Tuesday’s puz­zle. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I didn’t get any cor­rect answers. How­ev­er, I did receive an email from a col­lege stu­dent who made a very charm­ing case for an exten­sion. This guy was a total pro with his request, almost like he lever­aged his entire col­lege career for exten­sions. I like this kid! He was very con­vinc­ing. And so, thanks to David T from ASU, the dead­line is now Decem­ber 31, 2025. The first per­son to get their cor­rect answers to hello@mathsciencehistory.com will be eli­gi­ble for the $25 Ama­zon gift card and some Math! Sci­ence! His­to­ry! Mer­chan­dise! Again, the time trav­el puz­zle dead­line has been extend­ed to Decem­ber 31, 2025. The win­ner will be announced some­time in Jan­u­ary. Every­body say, “Thanks, David!”

That said, let’s get on to Math! Sci­ence! History!’s last Flash­cards Fri­day of 2025.

Rid­dles appear, almost like clock­work, at the end of the year, often­times in deep con­tem­pla­tion, because life is much like a riddle!

Not because peo­ple sud­den­ly become bored, but because the human brain enters a very par­tic­u­lar mode when time feels sus­pend­ed. The end of a year, whether marked by win­ter or rit­u­al, cre­ates a psy­cho­log­i­cal pause. Work slows. Trav­el becomes hard­er. Out­door labor decreas­es. The world nar­rows, and atten­tion turns inward.

Cog­ni­tive­ly, this is when reflec­tion takes over. Humans become more tol­er­ant of uncer­tain­ty, we revis­it unfin­ished thoughts, we replay con­ver­sa­tions, and we think in metaphor instead of urgency.

Rid­dles thrive in this men­tal environment.

A rid­dle is not a demand for speed; it is an invi­ta­tion to linger and to hold two ideas at once. It is the oppor­tu­ni­ty to resist the urge for imme­di­ate res­o­lu­tion. And when the answer final­ly arrives, it does not just feel cor­rect; it feels complete.

Anthro­pol­o­gists, his­to­ri­ans, and cog­ni­tive sci­en­tists have all noticed the same pat­tern: rid­dles are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly clus­tered around sea­son­al tran­si­tions, espe­cial­ly the turn­ing of the year. They are not ran­dom amuse­ments. They are cul­tur­al tools.[1]

Rid­dles teach patience, reward lis­ten­ing, and encour­age humil­i­ty, because the answer is often obvi­ous only after it has been revealed. Per­haps most impor­tant­ly, rid­dles train us to sit with ambi­gu­i­ty with­out panic.

At the end of the year, that skill mat­ters because end­ings are rarely clean. As many of us have real­ized, the years close with unfin­ished plans, unre­solved con­flicts, grief, and cel­e­bra­tions. It’s the cycle of life. And though life insists on these loose ends, the human brain doesn’t real­ly like them. 

So we pose rid­dles. And once you begin look­ing for them, you real­ize rid­dles are every­where, espe­cial­ly at the end of the year. They show up not just in books or games, but in rit­u­als, sto­ry­telling tra­di­tions, and qui­et evenings. The forms may dif­fer, but the pur­pose remains remark­ably consistent.

Three Ways Cul­tures Used Hol­i­day Riddles

Rather than cat­a­loging every cul­ture that used rid­dles, it is far more reveal­ing to look at how they were used. Across the world, win­ter rid­dles tend to fall into three broad pat­terns that are not based on geog­ra­phy, but rather on intention.

1. Rid­dles as Wis­dom Contests

In some cul­tures, rid­dles were seri­ous business.

In Norse and Ger­man­ic tra­di­tions sur­round­ing Yule­tide, rid­dles were not par­ty games but rather tests of fit­ness for lead­er­ship and sur­vival. In the Medieval ages, knowl­edge was pow­er, and wis­dom was dangerous.

One of the most famous exam­ples appears in the Poet­ic Edda, pos­si­bly writ­ten in the thir­teenth cen­tu­ry, where Odin dis­guis­es him­self and chal­lenges the giant Vafþrúðnir to a rid­dle con­test. In this con­test, the two exchange increas­ing­ly com­plex ques­tions about the ori­gins of the world, the fate of the gods, and the nature of time itself.[2]

The final ques­tion Odin asks is one only he can answer. The ques­tion is, “What words did he (he being Odin) whis­per to his son Bal­dr before plac­ing him on the funer­al pyre?” The giant real­izes too late that he has been speak­ing with Odin him­self, and the con­test ends in defeat.

What mat­ters here is not the mythol­o­gy, but the structure.

I love this rid­dle because this con­test is about bound­aries. About know­ing when knowl­edge becomes iden­ti­ty and about rec­og­niz­ing that wis­dom is not just infor­ma­tion, but context.

The con­text here is that win­ter was the sea­son for these con­tests because win­ter demand­ed fore­sight. A poor deci­sion could mean star­va­tion. A weak leader could doom a com­mu­ni­ty. Rid­dles trained peo­ple to think beyond the obvi­ous, to antic­i­pate con­se­quences, to respect the lim­its of their own understanding.

In these tra­di­tions, rid­dles were gate­keep­ers. They sep­a­rat­ed clev­er­ness from wis­dom.[3]

And they were dead­ly serious.

2. Rid­dles as Com­mu­nal Bonding

In many African and South Amer­i­can tra­di­tions, rid­dles served a very dif­fer­ent function.

Rather than ele­vat­ing one clever indi­vid­ual, these rid­dles were posed to groups. The rid­dles were col­lab­o­ra­tive, includ­ed a call and response, and were designed not to stump but to teach how think­ing togeth­er works.

In West African soci­eties, rid­dles were often shared in the evenings dur­ing peri­ods of agri­cul­tur­al down­time. One per­son posed the rid­dle, but the group solved it col­lec­tive­ly. In doing this, elders passed down envi­ron­men­tal knowl­edge, and chil­dren learned how metaphors worked. So, the goal was not speed, but par­tic­i­pa­tion.[4]

Sim­i­lar­ly, in Andean cul­tures, the tra­di­tion­al Quechua rid­dles known as watuchiku­na were used to train per­cep­tion. Objects were described through sound, motion, and rela­tion­ship to the nat­ur­al world. A rid­dle might describe an egg as some­thing white that wakes before the sun, or rain as some­thing that falls with­out feet.[5]

These rid­dles often appeared dur­ing sea­son­al tran­si­tions, when the rhythm of labor changed, and atten­tion could turn to teach­ing and sto­ry­telling. And these tra­di­tions did more than that; they also pro­vid­ed an empha­sis on shared intel­li­gence. It was a com­mu­nal rid­dle where no one per­son or group “wins.” Instead, suc­cess belongs to the group, and the answer mat­ters less than the process of lis­ten­ing, propos­ing, revis­ing, and arriv­ing together.

So, in a very real sense, these rid­dles trained empa­thy, and to solve them, you had to imag­ine how some­one else saw the world. And no doubt, empa­thy is a skill that is par­tic­u­lar­ly need­ed at the end of the year when we are all reflect­ing and celebrating.

3. Rid­dles as Qui­et Reflection

The third pat­tern appears in cul­tures that treat rid­dles as a form of dis­ci­plined calm.

For exam­ple, in Ger­man-speak­ing regions, rid­dles were exchanged dur­ing Advent evenings and the Rauh­nächte. Rauh­nächte is still cel­e­brat­ed in Ger­many and oth­er parts of cen­tral Europe. It’s not so much a hol­i­day as it is a cul­tur­al tra­di­tion where peo­ple observe the time between Christ­mas and the Epiphany. It runs between Decem­ber 24th and Jan­u­ary 6th, and it could be a time for intro­spec­tion, jour­nal­ing, reflect­ing, going on hikes with loved ones, sto­ry­telling, and, of course, beer. Because you can’t have Rauh­nächte with­out beer. Actu­al­ly, you can’t be in Ger­many and not drink beer, because it’s so good.

But the Rauh­nächte was believed to exist out­side ordi­nary time: it was a pause between what had been and what would come next, almost like a time machine float­ing in a place­less, time­less place in space. Rid­dles dur­ing the Rauh­nächte were not com­pet­i­tive. They were con­tem­pla­tive and often cen­tered on light, dark­ness, trans­for­ma­tion, and patience.[6]

Sim­i­lar­ly, dur­ing the Islam­ic Gold­en Age, rid­dles known as alghāz flour­ished dur­ing Ramadan nights. After fast­ing dur­ing the day, evenings became spaces for intel­lec­tu­al recre­ation. These rid­dles were math­e­mat­i­cal, lin­guis­tic, and log­i­cal. They hon­ored the idea that dis­ci­plined think­ing could itself be a form of devotion.

In Chi­na, this same reflec­tive rela­tion­ship to puz­zles became part of pub­lic life through the Lantern Fes­ti­val, where rid­dles were writ­ten direct­ly onto lanterns and dis­played in streets and mar­ket­places, effec­tive­ly turn­ing entire neigh­bor­hoods into shared puz­zle boards. Solved aloud and often col­lec­tive­ly, these rid­dles blend­ed word­play, sym­bol­ism, and lit­er­ary ref­er­ence into a form of com­mu­nal par­tic­i­pa­tion that empha­sized reflec­tion over speed, and pres­ence over competition.

When these prac­tices are con­sid­ered along­side sim­i­lar tra­di­tions else­where, a broad­er pat­tern begins to emerge. Across cul­tures, rid­dles con­sis­tent­ly func­tioned as a men­tal slow­ing mech­a­nism rather than a test of quick­ness or dom­i­nance, offer­ing the mind some­thing struc­tured yet gen­tle to hold onto dur­ing peri­ods of sea­son­al or social tran­si­tion. Instead of stim­u­lat­ing adren­a­line or urgency, they encour­aged sus­tained atten­tion, patience, and care­ful thought.

Seen in this light, it becomes clear that mod­ern hol­i­day puz­zles serve the same under­ly­ing pur­pose, even though their forms have changed. While we may no longer gath­er around a hearth to exchange rid­dles by fire­light, the instinct that gave rise to those tra­di­tions has not dis­ap­peared. Advent cal­en­dars, for exam­ple, divide antic­i­pa­tion into small, man­age­able incre­ments by reveal­ing a sin­gle piece of infor­ma­tion each day. At the same time, hol­i­day cross­words and board games reemerge dur­ing a time of year when fam­i­lies are more like­ly to pause, sit togeth­er, and engage in shared problem-solving.

It is here that the deep­er val­ue of rid­dles becomes most appar­ent. By ask­ing us to slow down, to tol­er­ate uncer­tain­ty, and to imag­ine per­spec­tives beyond our own, rid­dles qui­et­ly cul­ti­vate skills that extend far beyond enter­tain­ment. They teach us to lis­ten care­ful­ly, to remain open to solu­tions that may be sim­pler or more shared than we expect, and to rec­og­nize that under­stand­ing often emerges through patience rather than force. These capac­i­ties form the foun­da­tions of empa­thy, mak­ing rid­dles not only a fea­ture of hol­i­day tra­di­tion but a sub­tle form of moral and social training. 

For that rea­son, it feels appro­pri­ate to end this sea­son, and this episode, not with a dec­la­ra­tion or a con­clu­sion, but with a ques­tion. Not a trick ques­tion, and not a cul­tur­al arti­fact drawn from a sin­gle time or place, but a rid­dle that reflects the val­ues these tra­di­tions have car­ried qui­et­ly across centuries.

A Final Riddle

I grow when I am giv­en away.
I weak­en when I am hoard­ed.
I can­not be forced, yet I can change the world.
I have no lan­guage, but I am under­stood everywhere.

I end wars with­out weapons.
I heal wounds with­out touch.
I am old­er than nations and younger than every child who learns me.

What am I?

The answer, of course, is not some­thing you solve alone.

It is some­thing you practice.

And that may be the old­est puz­zle tra­di­tion of all.

The answer, of course, is love.

Not as a slo­gan, and not as a sen­ti­ment, but as a prac­tice. Love is some­thing we car­ry for­ward with us into a new year, and through our lives, not because it makes things easy, but because it gives us clar­i­ty about what mat­ters when things are hard. It is what allows us to hold griev­ances with­out let­ting them cal­ci­fy into bit­ter­ness, and to approach for­give­ness not as for­get­ting, but as choos­ing not to be ruled by harm.

Love gives us the abil­i­ty to see beyond our own imme­di­ate per­spec­tive, to rec­og­nize the human­i­ty in oth­ers even when dis­agree­ment feels sharp or per­son­al. It helps us pause before react­ing, lis­ten before judg­ing, and choose respons­es that move sit­u­a­tions toward res­o­lu­tion rather than esca­la­tion. In that sense, love becomes a kind of com­pass, qui­et­ly ori­ent­ing us toward what is right, even when the path for­ward is uncertain.

When prac­ticed con­sis­tent­ly, love also dis­solves fear. It does not elim­i­nate risk or uncer­tain­ty, but it gives us the courage to engage with the world any­way, to seize each day with inten­tion rather than retreat­ing into defen­sive­ness or doubt. It reminds us that mean­ing­ful progress, whether per­son­al or col­lec­tive, has always depend­ed on our will­ing­ness to act with care, empa­thy, and gen­eros­i­ty, even when those qual­i­ties feel vulnerable.

So per­haps that is the final les­son hid­den inside the old­est rid­dles and puz­zles we have shared across cul­tures and cen­turies. The most impor­tant answers are rarely solved once and set aside. They are answers we return to again and again, shap­ing how we think, how we lis­ten, and how we treat one another.

And that may be the most endur­ing puz­zle tra­di­tion of all.

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[1] Smith, David E.K., and Mary Kancewick. “Hear­ing Between the Words.” Jour­nal of Folk­lore and Edu­ca­tion 8 (2021). https://jfepublications.org/article/hearing-between-the-words/.

[2] Lar­ring­ton, C. The Poet­ic Edda. Oxford World’s Clas­sics. Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2014. https://books.google.com/books?id=r2vrAwAAQBAJ.

[3] Rudolf Simek, Dic­tio­nary of North­ern Mythol­o­gy, with Inter­net Archive (Cam­bridge [Eng­land] ; Rochester, N.Y. : D.S. Brew­er, 1993), http://archive.org/details/dictionaryofnort0000sime.

[4] Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Lit­er­a­ture in Africa. Open Book Pub­lish­ers, 2012. https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0025.

[5] Mannheim, Bruce. The Lan­guage of the Inka since the Euro­pean Inva­sion. Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas Press, 1991. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7560/746633.

[6] Rauh­nächte in the Snow — on the Road between the Years — Dis­cov­er Ger­many. Hesse. Novem­ber 18, 2021. https://entdecke-deutschland.de/en/bundeslaender/hessen/rauhnaechte-im-schnee-unterwegs-zwischen-den-jahren/.

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[1] Smith, David E.K., and Mary Kancewick. “Hear­ing Between the Words.” Jour­nal of Folk­lore and Edu­ca­tion 8 (2021). https://jfepublications.org/article/hearing-between-the-words/.

[2] Lar­ring­ton, C. The Poet­ic Edda. Oxford World’s Clas­sics. Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2014. https://books.google.com/books?id=r2vrAwAAQBAJ.

[3] Rudolf Simek, Dic­tio­nary of North­ern Mythol­o­gy, with Inter­net Archive (Cam­bridge [Eng­land] ; Rochester, N.Y. : D.S. Brew­er, 1993), http://archive.org/details/dictionaryofnort0000sime.

[4] Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Lit­er­a­ture in Africa. Open Book Pub­lish­ers, 2012. https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0025.

[5] Mannheim, Bruce. The Lan­guage of the Inka since the Euro­pean Inva­sion. Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas Press, 1991. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7560/746633.

[6] Rauh­nächte in the Snow — on the Road between the Years — Dis­cov­er Ger­many. Hesse. Novem­ber 18, 2021. https://entdecke-deutschland.de/en/bundeslaender/hessen/rauhnaechte-im-schnee-unterwegs-zwischen-den-jahren/.