Recursion is like something that you do when you have a big job that you can't do by yourself so you ask your friends to help. Let's say that you were asked to clean your room but its too big of a job to do so you ask two friends to help you and give each of them a part of the overall job that you were asked to do. If one of the two friends realizes that the job is to big for them to do by themselves, they will ask for help of two of their friends and this cycle continues until the job has been split up into pieces small enough for each individual person to do. Then as each person completes their piece of the job, they report back to the person who asked them initially and this process works its way back up the chain to you.