What is your temporal persistence? Like if you have some project you are putting off while trying to mull over a solution, how long do you generally keep that in mind until you find a solution or it fades from memory, replaced by something more productive. I’m not really talking about consciously shifting focus. I’m talking about the point when a project gets shelved unintentionally; you still hope to get back to it but usually do not. What is your temporal persistence like? Perhaps you complete every project, meaning you are less abstracted and that is fine too.
I once spent about four months trying to understand a single diagram in a math textbook.
I encountered this quotation afterward, which reassured me that feeling dead in the water for months at a time happens to the very very best of us.
I can illustrate the … approach with the … image of a nut to be opened. The first analogy that came to my mind is of immersing the nut in some softening liquid, and why not simply water? From time to time you rub so the liquid penetrates better, and otherwise you let time pass. The shell becomes more flexible through weeks and months — when the time is ripe, hand pressure is enough, the shell opens like a perfectly ripened avocado!
C. McLarty, The Rising Sea: Grothendieck on simplicity and generality, in J. J. Gray and K.H. Parshall eds., Episodes in the History of Modern Algebra (1800–1950), Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 2007.
