Me, I do spend a lot of time lost. I go down the alleyways, and up the hills, and through the valleys, and from time to time realize I don’t have a clue where I am. I do this both literally–I spent three hours lost in Pittsburgh recently, in a literal fog–and figuratively. Not everything on this blog is clear, for the simple reason that my thinking is not always clear. I think I’ve noted this a few times on here.
But what I’ve noticed is that if you circle a topic repeatedly, coming at it from different angles, making guesses, being wrong, adjusting, describing, redescribing, then abstracting, moving here, moving there, eventually you get at what might be called the “formula”, the short summary, the essence of a thing.
When I am concise, it is because of previous wordiness. When I am precise, it is because of long term fogginess.