Most people treat interruptions as enemies of good work — but the 11th-century Persian philosopher Avicenna's student, Al-Ghazali, noticed something stranger: the mind often produces its sharpest insights *during* transition, not inside protected blocks of time. Modern cognitive scientist Stellan Ohlsson's research on representational impasse confirms this — when a mental framework hits a wall, the brief cognitive 'reset' of switching contexts can dissolve the stuck pattern faster than grinding forward. The implication cuts against how most of us organize our days. We protect long stretches to do important thinking, then feel guilty when we drift. But the drift itself may be load-bearing. The question isn't how to eliminate interruption — it's how to make the transitions between tasks deliberate enough to carry the thinking forward, rather than just scatter it.

Name one transition you made yesterday — between tasks, roles, or places — and what, if anything, you noticed in that gap.

Drawing from Islamic Sufi Philosophy combined with Cognitive Psychology of Representational Change — Al-Ghazali (Ihya Ulum al-Din, c. 1095) and Stellan Ohlsson (Deep Learning: How the Mind Overrides Experience, 2011)