When the shine wore off that gem of mental deduction, I looked around for another explanation.  Could it be that my bathroom tiles had good karma that made them the source of my enlightenment?  Maybe the clay in the tiles was excavated from sacred ground in India or Tibet once considered holy by some ancient mystic religion.  I dubbed this idea my "mystic tile postulate".  Both of these explanations had seemed perfectly plausible in their time, and I dwelt on each of them for several months before finally being forced to cast them aside.  This came about after I reasoned that I needed a scientific test of my underlying assumption of shower stall revelation before attempting to publish anything.

On a day when my wife was off visiting her aunt and my kids were at school, I stayed home from work to perform my experiment.  I stepped into the shower stall wearing my favorite pair of Bermuda shorts and my PB ball cap, with a notepad and pen in hand.  I tried to think of answers to perplexing problems-like "why are some of us here?"  Is it because we are not all there?  And so forth.  After several attempts at inspired thinking throughout the day without so much as a trickle of truth or moment of muse, I had to dismiss my underlying assumptions related to the shower stall and find some other explanation.  I focused on the scent of my wife's green tea facial gel since I was certain that it was what made my nose tingle every time I climbed into the shower.  Another suspect was her wild aloe and chamomile foot scrub, but I never did get to the point of formalizing a theory before my thoughts moved on.

It was during another morning shower, somewhere between washing between my toes and final rinse that I thought about an analogy made by a great thinker relative to organizing and scheduling one's life-something to the effect that your life is like a big bottle that you are tasked with filling up.  You have really important things you need to do that are like big rocks, less important things that are like smaller rocks, everyday maintenance things that are like sand, and finally trivial things that are like water.  To get the most into the bottle, you should start by putting in the big rocks, then the smaller rocks, followed by the sand and finally the water.

Somewhere in the middle of this reflection it finally hit me!  Water was the key.  Water was not just what surrounded the more important things, it was the glue that held all the pieces together.  On a really grand scale, water is what sustains life on earth.  All the other planets in the solar system have the energy of the sun but only earth has an abundance of water.  And on a much smaller scale, my source of inspiration wasn't the shower stall or the tiles or even the wild aloe and chamomile foot scrub.  It was the warm water pouring down and surrounding me that fueled my creative thoughts.  On both a micro and a macro level, it is the water that makes all the difference. 

The wise use of this essential resource is the responsibility of all people, but how we locate, transport, purify, use and recycle water is the special trust of engineering professionals.  How we carry out that stewardship will ultimately affect our ability to sustain life on Earth and the opportunity for our children and our children's children to take warm showers.  How will civilization possibly progress into the next century without the creative thoughts made possible by a good warm shower?  My mind was reeling.  What a terrific insight.  And to think, all I had to do was add water!