The other day, our son was playing with some kinetic sand—think Play-Doh but made of sand—and he was making shapes using a plastic knife.
He was really into it.
Making cakes, castles, cheese, and other things that all looked the exact same but were labelled differently with each creation.
Suddenly, he misplaced his plastic knife.
He was distraught.
After searching "evvverrrryyywherrrreee" (correct spelling), he claimed he couldn't find it.
This post is about a small thought that occurred to me in the process of finding his plastic knife.
For context, he was playing with his kinetic sand in a corner of our living room.
So this was the first part of the thought that occurred to me.
Positioning
I knew, with 100% certainty, the relative position of the knife. I knew which corner of the living room it was in.
What this meant was, I could immediately eliminate all other corners of the living room, and all other rooms in the house.
We had the right position.
Persistence
The second part of the thought that occurred to me, was that this was now a persistence problem.
Meaning, it was just a matter of searching a very small area of our living room for long enough, because I knew with 100% certainty that the knife must be there.
After a few minutes, we found it. It was, naturally, buried in the sand.
Searching
Regardless of the form of happiness we are searching for (plastic knives or otherwise), in order to find the position to start from, it might be helpful to eliminate all the positions to not start from.
Persistence without positioning is pointless.
