Paying Attention

Last night I was reading to my son - in the bath, which is always an experience full of many distractions. I was reading a new book to him which had a clearly aquatic theme and seemed to consist mainly of showing various creatures and objects in an bogs, lakes, etc

I could tell that much without paying a lot of attention, and I was pretty sure I wasn't missing anything.

Anyway, we got to the end of the book and there was the line "Basically I think/Shells and stones and rocks and sand don't float because they sink".

"Aha!" I said to myself. "Look at the Baby Einstein Company - at it again with their tautological and vaguely Zen messages!".

Then I looked at the cover of the book. The title was "What Floats?" and every line in the book had been dedicated to describing what floats and what sinks. I had missed the entire message of the book, which was that to understand the concept of floating, you had to first understand the behaviour of very specific objects before moving on to understanding why these objects floated or not. The "What" is right there in the title.

So I guess what I take out of that is that sometimes we think we are more clever than we really are. Sometimes we get so absorbed in getting through something (this could be a project or a bath) that we don't pay attention, and miss the meaning of the moment.