They hand you a novel and a highlighter.
“Mark every sentence that starts with ‘The’.”
So you skim.
Eyes half-open.
Page after page.
Mechanical. Mindless.
It doesn’t matter what the story’s about—you’re not here for meaning, just patterns.
It’s easy.
You feel fast. Efficient.
Certain.
Then they say:
“Now mark every line spoken by the main character—but only in Chapter 3, after they’ve found the treasure, unless it’s a dream.”
You stop.
To do this, you’d have to read.
You’d have to know who the main character is.
Track what they want.
Notice when things change.
Feel the dream pulling at the edges of reality.
Understand when finding the treasure meant more than gold.
The task hasn’t just become harder.
It’s become different.
What worked before no longer applies.
You can’t just recognize—you must comprehend.
You can’t just look—you must see.
You can’t just extract—you must relate.
This is the moment you realize:
The highlighter was never enough.
There are things in life—and in systems—that will let you skate by on shallow recognition, until one day, they ask more of you.
Not more effort.
But more depth.
More presence.
More of the parts of you that can hold ambiguity, track relationships, and see the whole through the parts.
This is the turning point:
From scanner to reader.
From scribe to storyteller.
From syntax to meaning.
Some things are not puzzles to be solved.
They are stories to be understood.
And some problems do not yield to sharper tools—only to wiser eyes.