It started with a broken toilet.

As opening lines go, “It started with a broken toilet” doesn’t rank with “In the beginning...,” but I’m not the Master of the Universe. I’m a nice Jewish woman of a certain age, living alone, and my story begins with a broken toilet.

The toilet kept running; it wouldn’t refill, and I decided to fix it myself. After all, I’m a college graduate, so a simple toilet repair should be a breeze. And more importantly, I know how to Google.

So I hauled out my toolbox, which was brought over from the shtetls of Poland by my late husband’s father and lovingly handed down from generation to generation. The rust was so deep it was hard to tell a hammer from a screwdriver. I opened a can of soda, grabbed a bag of cookies for sustenance, and (forgive the pun) plunged into the job.

I hammered and I clanged, I pulled things out and I put things in. Water splashed, and I got wet and sweaty, and…frustrated! Nothing I tried was working, and the floor was covered with rusty tools and toilet parts, and all I had to show for it was a now empty bag of cookies. As the minutes passed, my blood pressure rose, my patience wore thin, and my frustration grew. I needed to get up and do something else, or I’d rip the toilet from the floor and toss it out the window!

Why did G‑d create frustration? G‑d works with an economy of motion. Like a champion ice skater, He operates with total grace and fluidity, without any superfluous gestures. Everything He created has a purpose, and there are no stray hairs in His universe. So why does this unpleasant emotion exist? I mean, if He wants us to complete a challenging task, why create an emotion designed to make us throw our hands in the air, grumble, and walk away before it’s completed? You’d think he’d give us a double helping of enthusiasm instead of a single scoop of frustration.

Inspiration eluded me, and I gave in to the urge to leave the room and take a break. I walked around the block, and thought about my recent medical visits. As a senior citizen, I’m wearing out my body parts faster than a 1985 Yugo, and like an old car, I spend a lot of time and money at various “repair shops.” To get my money’s worth, I try to squeeze every drop of benefit by ruminating on them later.

On my most recent visit, my doctor touted the benefits of weight-bearing exercise, such as walking. He said clomping around helps strengthen my bones. And a week later, while rummaging around in my mouth, my dentist echoed those thoughts, saying a lifetime of vigorous chomping has given me molars with excellent bone mass. I must say, the chomping has been a much more fun way to build bone mass than the clomping, and that’s probably why my teeth are now stronger than my hip bones.

While distracting myself from writing this article, with thoughts of clomping and chomping, I had an epiphany. Frustration is a “weight-bearing exercise” for our free will! Think of frustration as the pavement we’re pounding over and over as we work through a problem. Our free will meets the pavement, and like our bones, it gets stronger over time. Now I see why people with determination are said to have “backbone.”

But then, a second question arose. Why, I wondered, do we often solve problems by walking away from them for a while? How does distraction, which seems like a negative trait, lead to a positive solution? Obviously, I needed another distraction to get the answer to my question about distractions.

This time, I distracted myself by emailing my rabbi, R. Yochanan Posner, of Skokie Chabad. I shared my ideas about frustration, and he explained that frustration is the emotion we feel when what we’re doing isn’t working. It means we need to change something. We need to work harder, or try another approach, or rethink the problem.

That explains why a brief distraction when we’re frustrated often helps. It’s how we hit our mental and emotional reset button. We clear out the dust, and let fresh ideas in. If G‑d had given us a double dose of enthusiasm instead of frustration, we’d just keep pounding that square peg into the round hole endlessly, never succeeding. Instead, we take a break, reboot, and try something different.

We see this play out in Moses’ confrontations with Pharoah. Ten times, Moses asked Pharaoh to free us. Can you imagine how frustrating that must have been? But each time he confronted Pharoah, he brought the threat of a different plague. When one plague didn’t convince Pharaoh, a different plague took its place. It took 10 unique attempts until he saw success.

I don’t enjoy feeling frustrated. I doubt anyone does. It’s unpleasant. I know great inventors think of every failure as a step closer to success, but I much prefer to take the elevator than climb the steps. However, I now have two good explanations for why G‑d created this uncomfortable emotion. Like weight-bearing exercise, it helps us build “backbone” when confronting life’s problems. And like a warning light, it tells us that something we’re doing isn’t working, and we need to make changes.

So how does the story about my toilet end? Well, it took a bit of backbone and a couple of distractions, but I found my solution and it works just fine now. I called a plumber! I think I’ll clomp on over to the ice cream parlor, chomp on a sundae, and give my other bones a workout.