Perhaps you have had the experience of somebody else seeing something that you missed, even though you were in as good a position to see it. You might say, “Why didn’t I see that?”
Perhaps you weren’t paying attention in quite the way that was required for the mind to be open to that particular realization in that moment. Perhaps it is because everybody has their own life trajectory and conditioning … the momentum behind them that tills the soil of their attention so it is or isn’t available and receptive in any given moment. Louis Pasteur famously said: “Chance favors the prepared mind.”
And what is the prepared mind? It is a ready mind, an open mind, a mind that knows or maybe just intuits what it doesn’t know, questions its own tacit assumptions, and is drawn to inquire — to look more deeply beneath the appearance of things and perhaps behind the conventional narrative about why things are or aren’t the way they are.