What changes when I shift from problem-solving mode to approaching a situation with true curiosity?

I’m also having difficulty understanding what the question today is trying to evoke, or why “problem-solving mode” would be a bad thing.

But today I have a problem. I have some lost books and I need to refer to them to help a friend. I’ve been searching for them for two days, turning the house upside down. It’s not like I go anywhere other than the grocery store, very often. “Lost things,” for me, is triggering, and though I don’t panic, it does make me a bit obsessive about it and I lose sleep.. last night I even had a night terror and woke both my husband and I up. Not a big deal, but annoying. So I might as well try to use today’s question to solve my problem, eh?

During a bad time in my life, I was very confused, over-emotional, and very uncertain of just about everything. One day I came up with, “There are things that I know, and there are things that I don’t know. Start with what I know!” It was VERY helpful, and I would repeat it almost like a mantra. In fact, it helped me to rebuild my life on solid footing. And that seems, well, opposite to what today’s question implies. Curiosity is starting with what you don’t know and exploring, and there is definitely a place for that… but I’ve kinda done that shtick the last two days and haven’t gotten very far. So I think it’s time for logic and methodical deduction. And the reason it served me so well during the difficult time in my life, is that logic and method help to qualm the emotional clouds that obscure!!! And I have emotional clouds right now. It may not seem like a big thing, to lose two books, but as I said, I have some emotional trigger around losing things… it makes me feel unsafe. We’ll call that problem #2, Lol.

So just to give an example of, “Start with what you know,” I have figured out:
-It’s not in my bedroom where I usually read.
-I had them, and was reading them at the beginning of the year before I got busy.
-I have rarely gone anywhere this year except the grocery stores and I would not carry books into a grocery store.
– There is also a canvas bag missing.
– This year I have otherwise been to the bank to get a notarization, the library, the BMV, the hardware store, and to a local store to get a birthday card.

So then the next part is I will reduce the possibilities by calling around those places.

And I think my answer then to the question is, that if the problem is not emotionally charged, then curiosity can help to think outside of the box, BUT, if the problem IS emotionally charged, then I think it is better to start sorting the facts from the emotional and the unknowns, and then use logic to carefully build up an answer.