Attention had changed the density of the experience. The morning contained more because I was noticing more. That is not the same as saying the morning objectively contained more things than another morning. The cord would have been there whether I noticed it or not.
The coins would have had whatever history they had whether I ever looked down. The lemon squares would still have tasted like lemon squares.
But experience is partly made of what reaches us. A bird can sing outside a closed window and remain absent from my morning. A person can offer kindness that I am too distracted to register. A solution can sit beside a problem while I keep staring at the problem.
A coin can lie in the grass. Attention is not creation. But attention is often the doorway through which reality becomes available to us. That became especially clear with the coins. The little collection felt strangely satisfying. Not because I had become wealthy.
Nobody was calling the bank manager. The amount was trivial. But the image became useful almost immediately. A coin goes into a pocket. You do not have to spend it now. You do not even have to know what you are going to buy with it. You can simply carry it.
That became a new way of thinking about insights. I had spent much of my life believing that understanding had to arrive complete. If something mattered, I wanted to know what it meant. Preferably now. Preferably in a sentence I could repeat later.
But a coin does not become worthless because I have not spent it yet. Maybe an insight does not either. I can find something, recognize that it has value, and put it in my pocket. I do not have to understand this right now in order to value it.
