“Every time I catch myself trying to figure out other people's motives, I'll stop and ask myself: "What did I say or do that prompted the action? Why did I react to it as I did? Does what happened make a major difference to me, or am I making something big out of a trifle?"
Leave off that excessive desire of knowing; therein is found much distraction There are many things the knowledge of which is of little or no profit to the soul.” ~ Thomas Kempis
In my experience taking a deep breath, letting life's difficult moments flow over me, provides me with a moment of reflection, enabling me not to spend time attempting to decipher that which appears beyond my immediate grasp.
“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” ― Albert Einstein
Professor Einstein using few words wrote that knowing, and understanding are often worlds apart. Ones understanding arising from any given circumstance can takes days, weeks, months, or even years for that Eureka moment to present its clarification. Out of the blue, so to speak. The dropping penny may well be a matter of growing experience the result of life's teaching lessons providing the explorer with the answers to questions that presented themselves years past in anticipation of time... taking its time to supply the answer...at the appropriate time, when needed.
Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however they may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way to open the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all of the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison. But he certainly believes that, as his knowledge increases, his picture of reality will become simpler and simpler and will explain a wider and wider range of his sensuous impressions. He may also believe in the existence of the ideal limit of knowledge and that it is approached by the human mind. He may call this ideal limit the objective truth.
— Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld in The Evolution of Physics
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