I've noticed recently that it seems strangely common for me to find myself thinking long, philosophical thoughts during the journey to work. I can only assume this is a result of striking just the right balance between the aftereffects of a night's sleep (which tends to make me more creative and imaginative), the complete absorption of about half my brain in driving (all the bits of my mind that are useful for thinking about concrete things and the here and now are busy doing so), and perhaps also an unwillingness to start thinking about anything more immediately useful because I'll only have to abandon it when I get there and switch over to work stuff. (I don't think about work outside work, to a first approximation. Being able to hang it all on the hook when I leave the office is something I've always valued.)

This morning's thought was introspective in nature, and concerned a strange contradiction I've just noticed in myself.

I've always known that I am fundamentally a bottom-up, details type of person. I often have difficulty perceiving big pictures; my general attitude is that details are important, that big things are made up of little things, and that if you work with the details for long enough then eventually an inkling of the big picture will come to you. I therefore have noticeable communications trouble with the type of person who will take one look at a subject, discard the details as irrelevant, and think entirely in terms of the overall big picture; it's been known for me to talk to a big-picture person and simply have no point of common ground at all, because the largest scale on which I could make statements I judged reliable was still smaller than the smallest scale on which they could.

Another thing I've always known is that I'm temperamentally a long-term thinker. When considering a possible course of action, I'm generally inclined to consider its long-term consequences first and its short-term ones almost as an afterthought. It doesn't always work, because I'm not always able to see very far into the future; but it generally feels natural to me to first form a long-term plan and then decide on an action which is the first step on that plan, whereas it feels less natural (and, to be honest, almost culpably short-sighted) to take an action entirely for its short-term consequences and see where things go from there. There are exceptions, of course, but in many fields of life that's the way I like to work. I suppose this attitude might be what occasionally gets me accused by friends and colleagues of plotting to take over the world. (I think it's also what makes me bad at strategy games: I naturally form one plan, and then don't respond sensibly when that plan becomes unviable or disadvantageous owing to my opponent's moves. It's easier in the real world, which is usually less adversarial so plans remain valid for longer.)

Having juxtaposed those two paragraphs in this context, it will strike nobody as terribly surprising that I'm now going to draw attention to the contrast between them; but I think the journey to work this morning was the first time it's ever occurred to me to put those two facets of my nature side by side and see the strange contradiction.

The long term and the short term – strategy and tactics, if you like – can fairly obviously be identified with the big picture and the details. In that order. So if I want to take the long-term view but am fundamentally restricted in my ability to see big pictures, no wonder I find life frustrating a lot! I can't visualise my future very easily because I lack so many of the details which I would need to form a coherent big picture, but I'm naturally inclined to want to refer to that big picture when deciding on the details of what to do next. How my brain got itself into this Catch-22 situation I have no idea; how I've managed to be in it for decades without even noticing, I have even less.

I was walking from the car to the office door when this thought struck me. As I walked, I was peering into the mists of my future, trying to have some idea of where I was on any kind of overall life plan; I do this quite often, and I nearly always find it frustrating that I generally have no such plan. Then it suddenly occurred to me that for someone that uncertain about their life I was placing one foot in front of the other with a surprising amount of confidence: the one-step-at-a-time details of my life aren't difficult to work out, even if the overall big picture is hazy. For a moment I oscillated between seeing this as a natural consequence of my tendency to find details easier than overview, and seeing it as a frustration of my desire to put long term above short term, and suddenly my confusion transformed into a feeling of revelation and wonder as I suddenly saw clearly this essential contradiction in my mind and wondered how I could have failed to notice it before.

(Yes, I really do think this sort of thing early in the morning. This is why I prefer to stay in bed until it goes away. But a working life doesn't afford me that kind of luxury, so I'm afraid you all get the benefit of it in this diary.)

Of course, what to do about it is unclear to me even now. But to some extent just knowing about it might make me feel less frustrated; if I at least know there's a reason I don't have any good answers to the big questions, I might not spend so much time fruitlessly searching for them…