... what is easily missed................

     Still, why go to all this trouble?  The unexamined life is certainly worth living; an unreflective surfer should keep on surfing until the last of his or her blessed days.  Why then devote a life to formulating answers to questions that may not have what people would readily call "answers"?   For me at least, the value in philosophy and in surfing is not so different.  Both are fun!  But more to the point, waves and ideas are often sublime, or beautiful, or both, and in patiently attending to them, you see and feel ever more of what is easily missed.  You gain ever deeper understanding, ever greater attunement, in your thinking and your actions.  The superficiality of life, the mania for status or money or power, along with its contagious anxieties, then fades into the background, becoming white noise in a peaceful life lived by its own joyous music.

-Aaron James,  Surfing With Sartre:  An Aquatic Inquiry Into A Life Of Meaning