When I experience frustrations, I console myself by reminding myself that the setbacks are not interfering with the process of solving problems: they are themselves part of the problem I am solving.
This not only dignifies my frustrations, it enriches my problems.
I live for good, rich problems.
*
Insights are conceived in simplicity.
They grow by their own principles, unseen in the darkness of the inner-soul.
Then they fight their way out of you, and you push and push with with great strain and pain.
Then you hold the new idea in your arms and forget everything else.
*
Once I internalized the fact that everything is philosophy — most of all the painful aspects of life — my relationship to the world and philosophy changed and I spontaneously became a practical thinker.
I don’t think with an intention to produce useful ideas, but all my ideas happen to be useful.
Even when I am tasked with solving a problem, I begin by exploring the problem itself to see how many ways its questions can be asked. Somehow, unfailingly, an unintentionally practical solution comes of its own.
*
Nietzsche (of course):
Is there a more holy condition than that of pregnancy? To do all we do in the unspoken belief that it has somehow to benefit that which is coming to be within us! — Has to enhance its mysterious worth, the thought of which fills us with delight! In this condition we avoid many things without having to force ourselves very hard! We suppress our anger, we offer the hand of conciliation: our child shall grow out of what is gentlest and best. We are horrified if we are sharp or abrupt: suppose it should pour a drop of evil into the dear unknown’s cup of life! Everything is veiled, ominous, we know nothing of what is taking place, we wait and try to be ready. At the same time, a pure and purifying feeling of profound irresponsibility reigns in us almost like that of the auditor before the curtain has gone up — it is growing, it is coming to light: we have no right to determine either its value or the hour of its coming. All the influence we can exert lies in keeping it safe. ‘What is growing here is something greater than we are’ is our most secret hope: we prepare everything for it so that it may come happily into the world: not only everything that may prove useful to it but also the joyfulness and laurel-wreaths of our soul. — It is in this state of consecration that one should live! It is a state one can live in! And if what is expected is an idea, a deed — towards every bringing forth we have essentially no other relationship than that of pregnancy and ought to blow to the winds a presumptuous talk of ‘willing’ and ‘creating’. This is ideal selfishness: continually to watch over and care for and and to keep our soul still, so that our fruitfulness shall come to a happy fulfillment! Thus, as intermediaries, we watch over and care for to the benefit of all; and the mood in which we live, this mood of pride and gentleness, is a balm which spreads far around us and on to restless souls too. — But the pregnant are strange! So, let us be strange too, and let us not hold it against others if they too have to be so! And even if the outcome is dangerous and evil: let us not be less reverential towards that which is coming to be than worldly justice is, which does not permit a judge or executioner to lay hands on one who is pregnant!
*
Nature loves to hide itself.