Now Don’t Just Sit There

In my schoolboy days I was stumped by a mathematical problem I could not solve, although I had wrestled with it for half an hour. It was a very mild autumn evening, and the neighboring was playing noisy games not far from my window. I chewed my pencil in bafflement.
Then, the reaction sits in. “I’ll do this if it takes all night,” I said aloud to myself. My first move was to go over and close the window, partly shutting out the sound of the laughing and shouting nearby. It was not yet Sandown but I pulled down the shade and turned on the light. Then I crumpled up the sheets of paper I had been working on assembled all the available facts of the problem on a clean sheet, gritted my teeth, and in five minutes had my solution.
No one can tell whether a door is locked or not until he tries the knob. It is reported that Houdini was followed one time by prison guard who challenged him to escape from a cell that apparently he had locked. The magician worked on the combination with knob. The door wasn’t locked.
In tackling problems that comes to us, the first principle is action, movement. Don’t just sit there. Perhaps the first thing to do is to stand up. Battles cannot be won from rocking chairs. The Chinese have proverb that a journey of a thousands miles is began with first step.
Sitting tight in rare instance may be praise worthy, but in the vast majority of situations, exercise of the ankle bones toward some chosen goal keeps as mentally and spiritually alert, and tends onto fortune, So don’t just sit there!