Exciting and Depressing

Ever have something happen that's terribly exciting, as long as you don't think about it too much? I just had a mental breakthrough with my integrators: I realized a way to think about what's going on that makes everything perfectly clear. Then I implemented this in about 174 lines of Bigloo code. "That's great!" you say. I agree completely. Unfortunately, if I can't quite remain lost in the moment, I think of two mildly depressing things:

1. Why didn't I think of this sooner? I've spent the last few months playing around with these things, and then I figure out that pretty much everything I was doing before was wrong in the space of two days---and it's (in retrospect) obvious!
2. Someone else has to have had this thought! I'm almost scared to do a literature search tomorrow (time for bed now)---I'm sure I'll find half a dozen papers describing this technique and explaining why it's not better than what everyone else has been doing, etc (worst case) or that other people have had this thought and it's got promise for future implementations (much better, but still a bit of a bummer).

However, I'm still terribly excited! 174 lines!! It's so simple!!! This is great!!!!