If you think of the Go board as a battlefield and the stones as troops, you may get a sense of it. You're trying to secure large areas of the board. Do you spread out your forces at the risk of spreading them too thinly, or do you build solid walls with them at the risk of definitively securing only a small area.

In between these two extremes is the dance where the elegance happens. Large, seemingly secure areas get split into two. Multiple, separate battles grow and merge into larger ones. A single, well placed stone earlier in the game could prove pivotal as a battle creeps towards it.