You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trouble’. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing.
– “Reality has a surprising amount of detail”, John Salvatier.
The writer makes the case that when you examine tasks and phenomena because you are stuck, you uncover detail you’ve missed. And details you thought were important get put into perspective.
In the years I followed a regular meditation practice, I’d have days when interactions seemed to occur in higher resolution than usual. Visually I’d notice people’s cues and expressions. Aurally I’d be aware of the timbre of that person’s voice. As someone new to this it became too much to process. But that detail, and the sense of slowing down of time, meant that interactions also became more intuitive.
Of course the writer isn’t taking about mediation or HD interactions. He simply makes the case, quite well, that when you pay attention, “the important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them.”