The Art of Determination

Insight is often a double-edged sword: I’ve just had a “Eureka!” moment and realized that I’ve been doing something all wrong. Problem solved, but now to make up for lost time. Art is like life, learning from one’s mistakes, displacing the water in the bath and being pleased with the mess. Now to get on with it and run naked through the streets...

I've often felt that the old story about Archimedes and his bathtub had a slight apocryphal ring to it. There's such a touch of apologue in its retelling, of moral connotation. First off there's the obvious lesson of letting one's problems rest. Often we work ourselves to near death, chipping away at the obstacles before us, blind to the simpler routes obscured by our own myopic resolve.
Last night while working away at a problem of my own, I found myself reminded of Archimedes and that tub of his. While coming to realize the answers to the issues at hand, I'd happily solved the problem, but felt concommitantly that all too familiar sting of knowing that I'd spent days going in circles. Time wasted, and nothing's more precious.
But how would I have ever come around to the truth if I hadn't made those mistakes? Consequently that time was never fruitless, but was rather well spent. Some water had to get spilled before the answers could come to the surface. It's that old adage of try, try, and try again. Again, and again. I'm sure that an engineer like Archimedes was familiar with such determinations as that of seeing his goals through unlimited failures. And in the end it really is worth running about naked in the street, just like Archimedes supposedly did, if those failure's are finally trumped by triumph. It's the next obvious step, as the artist is stripped for the next challenge. It's either that or redundancy. That's what makes true art more than a practice, the continuous struggle to conquer oneself, to see through every conceivable difficulty toward every conceivable perfection. And so on, because it's never really finished with one all-encompassing solution. Just like life. We're pretty much naked little babies before every new problem, we just have to hold on to our humanity and see ourselves through. And take a moment now and then to relax, both in and out of the bath, because rest is as vital as work.