Mull

Sitting with a puzzle, Mull knows, can feel surprisingly hard at first.

"Your hands get fidgety," he says. "There's this itch to shout out the very first thing you think of." He knows the feeling from the inside — the little panic of not-knowing, the urge to fill the silence with any guess just to make the not-knowing stop.

But he also knows the wonderful part: "If you wait — if you breathe — the guess floats up on its own. And it's almost always a better one than the one you'd have blurted." Tapping his sit-tracker, he says the line he most wants kids to keep: "The waiting isn't empty. The waiting is where the wondering lives."

One afternoon a kid named Crack — who was always full of questions, and always first to shout — met a puzzle that stopped everyone short: an ice cube, floating in a glass of clear liquid, that sank.

"It's oil! No — it's salt! No—" Crack's guesses tumbled out on top of each other, faster and faster, none of them looked-at.

"Whoa," Mull said gently, sliding the sit-tracker onto the table. "Before the guess — let's just sit with it. Thirty seconds. Watch the cube."

Crack fidgeted. Thirty seconds felt like forever; his hand kept twitching toward another blurt. But Mull just waited, calm and slow, and nobody rushed in to rescue the silence. And in that quiet, Crack actually looked — really looked — at the cube resting on the bottom, at the way the liquid shimmered oddly where it met the glass. "…Oh," he said slowly, the fidget draining out of his voice. "Maybe the liquid isn't water. Maybe it's lighter than water, so the ice can't float on it." Mull's eyes crinkled. "Now that's a guess worth testing — and you found it by waiting, not by rushing." That was Mull's whole method, and he'd teach it the same gentle way every time: get a surprise, resist the first blurt, sit with the puzzle (the sit-tracker counting the quiet), let the real guess float up, then investigate. "Don't worry if the not-knowing feels uneasy at first," he'd add. "That's normal. Breathe. The waiting is doing the work even when it feels like nothing."