Thank you @Vineeto, I sincerely appreciate your reply and I have been giggling to myself in slight embarrassment this morning. Of course it is not that you embarrassed me but it is the facts that did, seeing what I have been doing did it haha.
Yes this is a good way to put it and in itself this shows where my priorities have been. To be content busying myself with “finding problems for the pleasure of solving them” whilst ‘I’ remain rotten.
I see what I have been doing now, there was this slight distance/dissociation between ‘me’ and ‘the problem’. ‘I’ can remain in existence by finding the next problem, always just slightly distanced from ‘me’, the more fancy the problem the longer ‘I’ can look for a solution and kid ‘myself’ that something productive is being done.
Whereas the below would be actually doing something :
The funny (but perverse) thing is that I have been doing the opposite! I have been trying to prove how damn difficult it is, thus not only blocking myself but others into the bargain. Indeed those priorities are all over the place.
I remember a correspondence on the AFT (which I cannot find now) where the correspondent mentions that Richard appears to be truly an exceptional person. Richard responds by saying that if the correspondent is being sincere in his observation then good, because they must dare to be an exceptional person themselves.
Time to raise the bar!