Insight thinking … involves storing information that, for one reason or another, we believe could be useful; recognising relationships between that stored information and what is currently in front of us; and realising combinations of information that aren’t explicit.*
Peter Turchi

Opportunity is another word for a problem to be solved. And opportunity is often there, but it rarely knocks.**
Seth Godin

We are well capable of noticing, receiving and storing, a way to prepare for a problem that hasn’t come to us yet, but may well turn into an opportunity if we are able to bring the power of our imagination to bear.

Wallace Stevens notices how the pressure of reality can destroy, or at least, interrupt, our powers of contemplation:

By the pressure of reality, I mean the pressure of an external event or events on the consciousness to the exclusion of any power of contemplation.^

Even as I have been reading and journaling, I notice how my ability to focus and reflect is being restricted by my having to watch the time, knowing that I will soon have to be out into the busyness of the day and all it seems to have been gathering through the week.

Pushed along, I find it impossible to rush contemplation.

Anthony Bourdain catches my attention momentarily, like a branch across a hurrying river rushing me along:

There is art left to be made in this world.^^

How easy to lose the beauty of our artfulness to functionality, or worse, expediency, rather than contemplate and imagine ourselves towards an elegant solution to the problem that has visited us.

*From Peter Turchi’s A Muse and a Maze;
**From Seth Godin’s blog: The chance you’ve been waiting for;
^From Wallace Stevens’ The Necessary Angel;
^^Anthony Bourdain, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: There is art left to be made in this world.