I'm a woman in my twenties working an information desk in the library of a future city, all curving ramps and towers. I have mixed feelings about my job--people come in with two general classes of problems. One looks hard, but I can solve them effortlessly. The other looks no harder, but I flub them every time. Maddening.

The hard problems aren't word-riddles, but physical problems--they appear in the sky and reach down to land, a bit like tornados. They even have a helical structure. But they're not wind--something solid. A tilted widening cylinder with a spiral ramp coiling up around it!

You can climb it. Where does it go?

People ask and ask, haunted by these stairs that follow them round... but they can't seem to climb them.

I can't answer.

At last, a really huge riddle-helix touches down in our area, and a man needs help with it. I go face it and try to climb its stairs.

Interesting. The structure generates a vicious pessimism inside me, so strong I don't even look for solutions! I just accept the funnel as a given, despite the mood it radiates.

You know, all these riddle-tornadoes have done this, but I never noticed--maybe because I was more distant where the field was mild, maybe because I'm rather pessimistic on my own. But up close it's clear. This is strong even for me, and reasonless. Induced!

Yet... as soon as I notice and set aside this helix-generated despair and self-criticism, the solution to the insoluble puzzle just pops out at me! I'm incredulous--but suddenly it's childishly easy.

And it wasn't from defeating my pessimism, or even from fighting it--all I had to do was merely notice it.

Uh...lesson? What lesson?

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