GESTALT: Defining the Problem

Yesterday, my Lovely First Wife came upstairs from the playroom and said, “When you have a moment, something’s wrong with the elliptical; the right footplate won’t go all the way down,” the presumption being that I was going to go fix it.

I went downstairs. There was nothing visibly awry with the right footplate. I got on the elliptical, and sure enough the right footplate did not go all the way down. It was odd, a kind of lopsided limp.

I examined the right side of the machine, compared it to the left side. They were identical. There were no adjustable thingies on either side that might have come unadjusted.

I used the poles to run the machine through its cycle, watching the right footplate glide back and forth on its track. Maybe the difference in height was an illusion? Nope, it was real. I went back through the comparing right to left: still identical.

I got down on the floor and really gave that right footplate mechanism a thorough going over. I could see nothing wrong with it; there was nothing to adjust, nothing out of place. This was driving me crazy. Once more I turned to the left footplate for comparison.

It was not on the track.

No, the left footplate was sitting on the floor. The problem was not that the right side wasn’t going down all the way, it was that the left side was just rolling back and forth on the floor and going too low.

The lesson we learn here is that before you start solving a problem with your work, make sure you understand what the problem is. When you step back from your ABORTIVE ATTEMPT and begin the process of GESTALT, pay attention to the WHOLE work. Especially if the problem you think you’re working on seems impenetrable: re-examine your assumptions of what the problem is. Your solution may be sitting right there in front of you.