In the wonderful musical, The King and I, there is a scene where the king is despairing about all these big issues that he has to grapple with and kind of potentially make decisions about, and he sort of throws up his hands because all of this to him is what he calls a puzzlement.
I think in life there are times where we’re faced with two things around decisions we’re struggling with or problems we can’t solve.
One is the frustration over the specific problem we’re trying to solve, and the other bigger picture issue is the frustration that there are problems we can’t solve.
I think at those moments it is not a bad idea to just kind of throw up your hands the way the king did, and admit that life is a puzzlement. Sometimes it’s amazing how when we decide that perhaps these things aren’t solvable at all, and we kind of move on in a different frame of mind, relieved of the pressure of trying to solve all those things, that sometimes some really good solutions come into our mind right after that.