A still point and a moving point have the most hope of intersecting.
This is one of those irritating, half-remembered inspirations, which meant a great deal to me at the time. I should have recorded the source, but life was busy, and I never got around to it. I know for certain it’s an idea from the Canadian author Rudy Weibe. http://www.canadianauthors.net/w/wiebe_rudy/
I think it comes from his Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic (NeWest Press, 1989), but I only learned about the idea some time after the turn of this century.
Regardless of source, the idea is that in the Arctic, where landmarks are there—if you know how to look for them—when someone is lost, the best chance to be found is to combine a still point and a moving point. The trick is to know whether you should be the still point or the moving one.
For someone lost in the Arctic, the wisdom has been communally passed down for centuries. The lost person stays still; the search party moves.
What I learned from this is that when I’m batting my head against a seemingly-unsolvable problem, in essence when I’m lost, sometimes the best solution is to stop moving and find a still centre within myself. Chances are that there is a rescue party out there looking for me.
If you don’t believe this works, try this experiment the next time you lose your spouse in a shopping mall. Stop. Stand still. Your spouse will find you.