Purposeless purposefulness

When creating any type of creative work (and scholarship is part of this) one must be purposeful yet at the same time act in semi-random, indirect, or lateral ways. You want to work for a finite period of time each day, and explore only a few concepts. I was interested today in what the veins of leaves are. In Spanish it is called "nerviación" or "nervadura." They are visually fascinating. I heard in my head the phrase "la nerviación de la hoja de laurel" from a poem by Claudio Rodríguez. We know there is a kind of seam down the middle of a leaf, and the nerves or veins branch out from there symmetrically, more or less, and then there are other little lines that branch out from the main veins. These are visually fascinating.