I feel like I have been untying a particularly tedious knot.  I have been pulling and teasing and twisting to no avail.  The knot is wet because I attempted to get some leverage on a particularly nasty tangle.  This had made the untying even more difficult.  But, wait!  I think I may have untwisted something crucial.  Is this the first knot.  I hope.  I hope that I can begin to unravel some problems I have been working on with plodding frustration for a while.  

I must remember that there is always a stage of any kind of work professional or personal where exertion seems meaningless. It always require a special kind of wisdom to know when one should just lay down the entire knotty mess and when you should keep struggling a long.  You might be working towards the solution....or you might be making the problem terribly worse.